Spurious Be in Thai Learners’ L2 Grammars
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This paper is data oriented; it attempts to determine the status of be preceding bare VP and NegP complements, in data obtained from written expressions of 32 Thai EFL students. As this spurious be has not been examined intensively and its status is crucial to understanding L2 acquisition of tense and agreement, this study conducted a systematic investigation of this issue. Having employed data related to IP and CP, it claims that spurious be is restricted to IP, and is inserted into Infl, in the Do-support fashion. Spurious be is triggered by not and finiteness. Supporting evidence involves the fact that spurious be occurs in the absence of do, in conjunction with uninflected lexical main verbs. It is claimed that L2 learners are not influenced by their L1, have access to functional categories available from UG, and apply insertion of be exclusively for IP.
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