Original scientific paper
Acquisition of adverbs in Croatian as a second and foreign language
Maša Musulin
Željka Macan
Abstract
The subject of this paper is the acquisition of adverbs in Croatian as a second and foreign language. After a brief overview of modern Croatian grammars and course books for Croatian as a foreign language, the usage of adverbs in essays written by learners of Croatian will be analyzed. Adverbs are neglected in Croatian grammars and in manuals of Croatian as a foreign language. In most of the grammars, the description does not go beyond word formation and general division of adverbs according to their meaning. In grammatical parts of manuals, the Croatian adverbs are not even mentioned, as is the case with other unalterable categories of words. Temporal and local adverbs are necessary for basic conversation in the Croatian language, as well as some other semantic categories of adverbs. The written data is collected from students during a four-week course of Croatian at A2 level. It consists of 60 essays (492 sentences and 4,478 tokens) produced by 10 Croatian learners. Each learner used on average about 30 adverb tokens. Adverbs are grouped according to their meaning and frequency, which is compared to a general frequency list of Croatian adverbs. Students use only four categories by meaning: time (23 types), manner (21 types), quantity (12 types) and place (11 types). By the number of tokens quantity adverbs were the most frequent (162), followed by time (95), manner (60) and place (37). Most errors are found in the usage of adverbs (especially with synonyms) and to some extent in forms. Although it is not a surprising feature of the interlanguage of students, it seems that not many manual writers are aware that adverbs should be taught, although they morphologically do not inflect.
Keywords
acquisition of Croatian as L2; acquisition of grammar; vocabulary acquisition; adverbs
Hrčak ID:
10913
URI
Publication date:
27.2.2007.
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