Nominal Agreement in L2 Speakers of Italian: Suggestions for a Teaching PlanTeaching Plan • June 10th, 2021
This paper addresses the topic of adult acquisition of nominal agreement in Italian, a crucial issue in teaching Italian as Second/Foreign Language. Building on a corpus containing spontaneous and semi-spontaneous production data from two advanced L2-speakers of Italian, I show that nominal agreement can be problematic even in the last stages of the acquisition process. The discussion of the instances of missing agreement in the corpus suggests that these are not due to a missing knowledge of the agreement rules in Italian, but instead on processing and production. In particular, some contexts prove to be more difficult than others: gender agreement (i.e., agreement with feminine nouns) is more difficult than number agreement, and the presence of two or more modifiers that refer to the same noun increases the error rate. Another difficulty is offered by the cases in which an item external to the determiner phrase (DP) has to agree with the subject of the clause. All these issues are ta
