Source of Transfer in the Acquisition of French as a Third Language from the Generative Perspective

This thesis investigates the source of transfer in the acquisition of nominal and verbal domain of French as a third language by Korean and Chinese adult students who have learned English as a second language. Theories of syntactic transfer including the L1 Factor, the Cumulative-Enhancement Model, the L2 Status Factor and the Typology Primacy Model will be reviewed and examined with the written production results of four syntactic structures of French; mainly, the distinction of (in)definite articles, the placement of adjectives, the placement of verbs and the negation. Our results show positive and negative transfers from both the L1 and the L2 separately or collaboratively. The latter seems to support the argument of multi-competence, according to which the interlanguage is treated as a whole instead of a distinct L1 and L2. Moreover, in the cases where a syntactic structure is not typologically similar to the L1 or the L2, our participants seem to have direct access to Universal Grammar.