Thirteen advanced English learners, twenty-three advanced Spanish learners, and a control group of native Russian speakers completed Grammaticality Judgement and Semantic Judgement tasks. According to FRA, L2 learners contrast feature configurations from their native grammars with those of the L2, and analyze them by selecting, assembling and mapping the new feature configurations onto appropriate L2 items. Acquisition is also proposed to be understood based on features, in particular on feature re/assembly, as advanced by Lardiere (2009) in her Feature Reassembly Approach (FRA).
A feature-based approach is then taken to delineate the differences between Russian applicative experiencers and their equivalents in English and Spanish, the two background languages of the participants in our studies. Applicative experiencers are thus argued to manifest yet another type of Russian applicative argument in addition to other previously identified applicatives (Markman 2007). These experiencers are proposed to be arguments of a Super High Applicative head. If the verb surfaces in its active form, the nominative argument merges as an experiencer with psych verbs or an agent with activity verbs however, if the verb surfaces in its impersonal (non-active) form, this gives rise to a dative experiencer with both types of verbs, which renders these structures interpretationally intricate. Applicative experiencers appear with impersonal constructions based on psychological (psych) or activity predicates in Russian. This thesis explores the topic of second language (L2) acquisition of Russian applicative experiencers by English and Spanish learners.
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