Agadir, Marruecos
This study examines how trilingual adults who speak L1 Arabic and L2 French acquire the compounding parameter in English a foreign language. The parameter clusters three structures: noun-noun compound, verb-particle predicates, and adjectival resultative constructions. Pre-intermediate and advanced English learners, along with native speakers, completed an acceptability judgment task designed to test the three structures and their periphrastic forms. The results showed that the learners successfully acquired noun-noun compounds and, but not the English predicate patterns. The L1 transfer interferes with the acquisition of verb-particle and adjectival constructions. Unlike L1 acquisition, the study concludes that the three structures appear not to form a unified cluster parameter in multilingual grammar.