The Role of Complement/Adjunct Identification in the L2 Acquisition

Abstract

This study investigates how a learner’s first-language interacts with their developmental sequences. It focuses on morphology and syntax acquisition in learning English as a foreign language (EFL). The current article mainly describes how a learner identifies the head of an English expression and explores the application of Cognitive Grammar. Distinguishing the “head” (the constituent that determines the syntactic category of a word or phrase) from “non-heads” (complements or adjuncts) plays a crucial role in comprehending (and producing) multimorphemic words such as books. To address this issue, we employ Dowty’s (2000) dual-analysis perspective regarding issues of complement and adjunct identification, which allows for a better account of a systematic semantic and syntactic distinction process in learning a foreign language, which initially appears to be at odds with the traditionally assumed unambiguous function of lexical elements.