an empirical l 2 perspective on possessives : french / norwegian

The main objective of this paper is to present empirical evidence for transfer effects between Norwegian (as L1 or L2) and French (as L1 or L2). We start out with theoretical assumptions from a contrastive-comparative treatment of possessives in European languages (Fabricius-Hansen et al. 2017) and develop hypotheses for L2-acquisition of possessive systems in Norwegian and French. The various degrees of complexity between the two linguistic sub-systems lead to different kinds of challenges in L2-acquisition based onmorphological, syntactic and semantic criteria. Norwegian has a morphologically more complex possessive system than French. The French learner of Norwegian as L2 then has to acquire a system with more formal options than in her mother tongue, whereas the Norwegian learner of French as L2 acquires a system with less formal options. Based on empirical findings, the paper shows why some parts of the possessive L2 systems are harder or easier to handle than others.

an empirical l2 perspective on possessives: french/norwegian University of Oslo a b s t r a c t The main objective of this paper is to present empirical evidence for transfer effects between Norwegian (as L1 or L2) and French (as L1 or L2).We start out with theoretical assumptions from a contrastive-comparative treatment of possessives in European languages (Fabricius-Hansen et al. 2017) and develop hypotheses for L2-acquisition of possessive systems in Norwegian and French.
The various degrees of complexity between the two linguistic sub-systems lead to different kinds of challenges in L2-acquisition based on morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria.Norwegian has a morphologically more complex possessive system than French.The French learner of Norwegian as L2 then has to acquire a system with more formal options than in her mother tongue, whereas the Norwegian learner of French as L2 acquires a system with less formal options.Based on empirical findings, the paper shows why some parts of the possessive L2 systems are harder or easier to handle than others.
[1] i n t r o d u c t i o n In this chapter, we discuss empirical questions related to the acquisition of the possessive systems in French as L2 (Fr2) and Norwegian as L2 (No2).Based on the theoretical background of Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017) we will see how the diverging possessive systems of the two languages in question represent challenges for production as well as comprehension.The main objective of this chapter is to present empirical evidence for transfer effects between the learners' L1 and the L2.
In section [2] we recall some of the main points concerning the contrasts between the French and Norwegian system.We develop in section [3] some hypotheses for the language pair Norwegian-French which are tested against data from our empirical investigation.As will be clear, the tests can be elaborated and refined for future research.
[76] hans petter helland [2] n o r w e g i a n a n d f r e n c h p o s s e s s i v e s i n c o n t r a s t Norwegian has two sets of possessive determiners marking morphologically the reflexive-irreflexive distinction in the third person: The reflexive possessives in (1) and (2) (through coindexation and principle A of Binding Theory) are bound by the pronominal subjects meaning unambiguously that he and they necessarily got their own cars back.In contrast, the irreflexive possessives in (3) and ( 4) exclude binding from the subjects, meaning that the pronominal subjects (he and they) found someone else's car, not their own.In such cases, reflexive and non-reflexive possessives are in complementary distribution. 2 When comparing the Norwegian examples in (1)-( 2) and ( 3)-( 4) with their French counterparts in ( 5)-( 6), we see that the obligatorily preposed French possessives son and leur accept binding both clause-internally -from the local subjects (il and ils) -and clause-externally.The French third person possessives however vary in number with respect to the possessor, yielding third person singular son or plural leur: (5) Il i he a found retrouvé again sa i/j poss voiture/*voiture car sa.
Concerning the reflexivity parameter the French possessive determiners in ( 5) and ( 6) are thus potentially ambiguous, letting the context decide if they are to be interpreted as reflexives or non-reflexives.Tables 1 and 2 summarize the properties [1] The Norwegian possessive may occur in postnominal or prenominal position.In the former case the head noun must be doubly specified for definiteness, through a definite suffix (bil-en) and the postposed possessive determiner (see Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017) of the French possessive system in the third person compared to Norwegian.
French is similar to German in not distinguishing between reflexive and irreflexive possessives (Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017) and Pitz et al. (2017)).Moreover, neither German nor French makes the human/nonhuman possessor distinction.But contrary to German, French does not mark the gender of the possessor whether in the singular or the plural.In other words, son N may apply to a third person singular human possessor -either masculine (son N à lui) or feminine (son N à elle) -and even to a third person singular nonhuman possessor.Once the (human or nonhuman) s*-possessor stem is determined, the agreement features on the noun are given by the possessum noun alone: son/sa/ses N.
The French learner of No2 has to deal with a morphologically (far) more complex system in the target language than in her mother tongue, and the morphological similarities between the systems, French s* and Norwegian si* -turning out to be false friends -even open up for wrong transfer predictions; see Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017, section 4).What is an explicit marking in Norwegian both for the reflexive-irreflexive and for the ±human possessor distinction (between si* and hans/hennes/dens/dets/deres) is subsumed under one single form in the third person singular in French.Yet, without making the reflexive and irreflexive distinction, French has separate forms for third person singular and plural possessors.Conversely, Norwegian learners of Fr2 acquire a system on the one hand with less morphological options (no reflexive-irreflexive marking, no gender marking of the possessor, no ±human marking of the possessor), but on the other hand with additional marking of the number feature (s* vs. leur*) of the possessor which in Norwegian is marked only in the non-reflexive paradigm.
The differing points between the French and Norwegian systems may be summed up in a simplified fashion as in figure 1.
Our main objective in the following is to determine how such systemic differences influence the processes of acquiring Norwegian or French as L2 by French and Norwegian speaking learners respectively.In the next sections, we formulate some specific hypotheses both relating to the command of No2 possession by French learners and Fr2 possession by Norwegian learners and test them against data.
[3] h y p o t h e s e s a n d e m p i r i c a l t e s t s [3.1] Norwegian as L2: testing French learners' command of No2 possessives We predicted in Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017) that French No2-learners have problems choosing between possessive si* and its irreflexive counterparts hans/hennes/ dens/dets/deres.One could therefore formulate a hypothesis like the following: H1 French No2+ learners of Norwegian make errors involving si* versus hans/ hennes/dens/dets/deres.
Let's see how this hypothesis can be tested.In the first place we will distinguish between grammaticality judgment tests and translation tests focusing both on relevant linguistic knowledge (judgment tests) and on production and comprehension tasks (translation tests).

Judgment test
We find evidence for H1 in a (monolingual) grammaticality judgment task performed on 14 French learners of Norwegian, all aged between 16 and 18 with two to three years of Norwegian training in school (three hours per week).The tests an empirical l2 perspective on possessives: french/norwegian [79] took place at Lycée Alain Chartier in Bayeux during the spring and autumn of 2016 where Norwegian is taught as an optional subject based on the Norwegian upper secondary school system. 3The judgment test contained twelve Norwegian test sentences with determiners including possessives followed by five contextually isolated sentences for translation French-Norwegian and took the following form (see appendix for the full test): 4 The upper secondary school in the Norwegian system has three levels: VG1, 2 and 3.In our data set we have nine informants from Bayeux from the spring of 2016 -of which seven are from VG2 and two from VG3.We still only count 14 informants from Bayeux in our samples below.The reason is that seven of the first nine informants took the same test six months later.The total number of informants are therefore 14. [4] To date, no large scale experiments have been conducted on the acquisition of either Fr2 by Norwegian learners or No2 by French learners (but see Woldsnes (2013) for comparisons between the two systems for inalienables).What we refer to below must therefore be seen as preliminary tests.The main focus of the test is on third person possessives, both singular and plural, and mainly based on the reflexive-irreflexive distinction.The judgments of the informants will then give us an indication of how well the reflexive-irreflexive distinction is integrated in the grammar of the French No2 learner Let's have a look at some examples.Since the possessive in ( 8) refers back to the subject referent of the same clause, the only grammatically correct form is the reflexive sin.The example in ( 8) is therefore clearly ungrammatical.However, five of fourteen French No2 students found the sentence acceptable, two were uncertain and only 7/14 judged it (correctly as) ungrammatical.The same pattern is repeated for the ungrammatical ( 9), which demands a reflexive sin: Bestemor har nettopp kjøpt hus med hage.Hun i liker å vaere i hagen *hennes i (√sin i ).
Lit.: 'Grandmother has recently bought a house with garden.She likes to be in *her.irrefl(√her.refl)garden.' Seven informants accepted this sentence, four were uncertain (based on the answer vet ikke 'don't know') and only three judged it (correctly) as ungrammatical.Even more strikingly, in non-local binding cases like (10) where Norwegian reflexives are clearly out, a number of the French informants accepted si*: (10) Christian har en søster.Søsteren *sin i (√hans i ) er laerer.
From our data, there thus seems to be a tendency for the French No2 learner of Norwegian to overgeneralize the usage of si*-forms, corroborating H1 above as a false friend-effect.This pattern can be explained by the systemic differences between the languages since French does not make the reflexive-irreflexive distinction at all.When a Norwegian irreflexive hans or hennes is used wrongly instead [5] For clarification for the reader of this paper, co-indexing has been added.
an empirical l2 perspective on possessives: french/norwegian [81] of the reflexive si* (( 7)-( 9) above), most of our informants judge it grammatical, which means that, in this case, they base their judgment not on formal similarities between L1 and L2.We cannot rule out, either, a possible influence of English as L2 in the narrow sense.On this account, there is potential evidence for transfer, but this time from L2 to L3.As we have seen in Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017), transfer may stem from L1 (and even Universal Grammar) or possibly L2 if the language acquired is L3 or L3+.Such questions are empirical in nature, and need further testing.For French speaking learners of Norwegian (in northern France), English may indeed be a L2 source for transfer into Norwegian L3. 6 These are all instances of negative transfer.
Conversely, we expect that in cases where s*-forms are used in both languages, there should be positive transfer from L1 to L2.We formulate the hypothesis in H2: H2 When si* corresponds to s*, French No2+ learners make less errors.
We find support for H2 in (11) below.For such cases there is in fact a vast majority of correct judgments (11/14): (11) Jeanette i rydder sjelden rommet sitt i .
Lit.: 'Jeanette seldom cleans her.refl room.' However, the correct judgment of the reflexive case in (11) does not mean that all the informants have acquired the reflexivity contrast.Rather, the informants tend to interpret, more generally, the Norwegian si* in accordance with the s*-possessive in their French L1.

Translation test
Our judgment data are supported by the bilingual translation data of test 2: Test 2: Translation into No2 Traduisez les phrases suivantes en norvégien : a (i) Ils ont acheté leur maison en 2010.
[a] Translate the following sentences into Norwegian.
In the translation test the (French) No2 learner has to decide whether to use the reflexive (si*) or the non-reflexive forms (hans/hennes/dens/dets/deres).In addition (s)he has to choose between the prenominal or the postnominal position of the possessive, and, in the latter case, associate the position of the possessive with double definiteness (see Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017); Julien (2003Julien ( , 2005)); Lødrup (2011)).It should be noted that both for the judgment and the translation test the French informants are fully aware of being tested for possessives.
Based on the fact that French lacks the reflexive-irreflexive marking, yet distinguishes between singular and plural third person possessors, we predict that French No2 learners will have problems (H1) acquiring the distinction between the possessor oriented plural interpretation of the reflexive s* and the irreflexive hans/hennes/deres etc.We find errors in the translation test like (12) (non-local binding requires hennes) and ( 13 Out of the fourteen informants only four chose the (correct) si*-form in (13), although sometimes with agreement errors: huset *sin.At a higher decision level, the possessum-oriented nature of their French mother tongue system combined with ±reflexive-irreflexive marking makes Norwegian hard to acquire by the French speaking learners.

Other cases
As we have seen in Fabricius-Hansen et al. ( 2017) there are well known systemic differences between Norwegian and French at the morphological and syntactic level related to position and definiteness (see also Julien (2003Julien ( , 2005)); Lødrup (2011)).There is a tendency in Norwegian to postpose the possessive combined with obligatory double definiteness: bil-en hans -*bil hans.Curiously, the position of the possessive does not seem to represent particular problems for any of the French No2 learners.Even the double definiteness feature is largely acquired, especially in the singular.For instance, the translation of leur maison in the translation test (sentence 1) has a hundred percent rate of correct definite huset followed by the (often wrong) possessive.The same goes for son sac, son oiseau and leur patron.For the plural leurs conditions de travail and nos habitudes, however, the results are quite different.Virtually none of the (fourteen) informants have acquired the definite plural.We rather get the erroneous: *arbeidsforhold sine -*arbeidsforhold deres instead of (the correct) arbeidsforhold-ene sine etc. 7 [3.2] French as L2: testing Norwegian learners' command of French possessives Not surprisingly, the complex nature of the reflexive-irreflexive distinction in Norwegian also plays a role when Norwegian speakers acquire French as L2.In fact, a challenge for Norwegian Fr2 learners is the problem of acquiring the possessorrelated distinction between singular s* and plural leur* when used reflexively.
Based on the theoretical outlook of Fabricius-Hansen et al. ( 2017), we may thus make the following hypothesis: H3 Norwegian Fr2 learners make errors involving s* and leur*.More generally, s* tends to be generalized in plural possessives.
We have designed three different tests in order to verify this hypothesis.The tests are mainly intended for production-comprehension data (translation and cloze tests), but they also indicate aspects of the informants' general level of linguistic knowledge (judgment test).By analyzing learner data from different sources we aim at a better understanding of the mechanisms at stake in the acquisition of French as L2.

Translation tests
For Norwegian Fr2-learners we have various tests but the purpose of them is never explicitly marked.First, (bilingual) translation tests both into (test 3 below) and from Norwegian (test 4): Test 3: Translation Fr2→No1 [a] Translate the following text into French.Again, for clarification, we have put all the possessives in bold.
The French text (test 3) has a number of possessives to be dealt with, for instance sa belle Carla Bruni 'his beautiful CB' -sa carrière 'her career' -son passage 'his accession to…' -son plus grand fan 'her biggest fan' -leur ancien president 'their former president' -son époux 'her husband' -ses concerts 'her concerts' -mon dix-septième concert 'my 17th concert' etc.These include both reflexive (locally bound) and non-reflexive (non-locally bound) uses in French, which must be made explicit in Norwegian; third person singular and plural possessives, first and second person deictic possessives, position of the possessive, and so on.
The Norwegian text (test 4) is the other way around.Explicit reflexive and non-reflexive marking in the third person singular and plural of Norwegian must be rendered in the less morphologically specified French system.In other words, the predominantly possessor-oriented system of Norwegian must find its correspondences in the possessum-oriented system of French.The Norwegian text has forms like sin musikk 'his.reflmusic' -musikken hans 'his.irreflmusic' -sin kone (his.reflwife) -mannen sin 'her.reflhusband' -deres konserter 'their.irreflconcerts' -stemmen hennes 'her.irreflvoice' -dens helt spesielle klang 'its.irreflexceptional hans petter helland sound' -sin manns død 'the death of her.refl husband' etc.
The translation tests had participants both from the University of Oslo and the University of Caen, thus marking the distinction between students in an immersion context (Caen) and Norwegian students at home (Oslo).The Caen students were Norwegian students going to France (Caen) for one year studying French as L2 based on the Norwegian university system.The Norwegian students of French L2 at the University of Oslo follow the same program, but this time in a local Oslo University setting.
For the French to Norwegian (Fr2→No1) translation, we had 36 L2 learners of French at the University of Oslo during the autumn of 2015 and 14 L2 learners of French in an immersion context at the University of Caen.For the Norwegian to French translation, we had 21 L2 learners of French at the University of Oslo during the autumn of 2015 and 14 L2 learners of French in an immersion context at the University of Caen.Both groups had studied French grammar at the University level for about two months (requiring that they have two years of training in French from upper secondary school) and had been exposed to explicit teaching and training in determiner syntax and semantics, including possessives.The testing was done in the classroom and took approximately half an hour.
H3 is easily corroborated by our data.In the translation test 4 (No1→Fr2), we find the following examples: (14) Hun i opptrådte ofte sammen med mannen sin i , og ([hun og mannen sin] j =) deres j konserter i Europa fikk gode kritikker.Lit.: 'She often acted with her.refl husband and their.irreflconcerts in Europe received good reviews.' (15) På Troldhaugen blir det også arrangert konserter med band i både fra Norge og fra utlandet, som kommer til Bergen med sine i tolkninger av Griegs musikk.Lit.: 'At Troldhaugen concerts are also staged with bands both from Norway and abroad that come to Bergen with their.reflinterpretations of Grieg's music.' Both in ( 14) and ( 15) there are semantically plural possessors: she and her husband for the non-reflexive deres (14) and bands from Norway and abroad for the reflexive sine (15).Our immersion-group from Caen, having fourteen participants, had no problems at all rendering deres konserter in their French translations.Of the 14 informants, only one missed out by saying *ses concerts.The rest of the group used the correct stem form leur*, even with the correct possessum-agreement in all but one case: leurs concerts.This shows that the possessor-related plural possessive leur* has indeed been integrated in the students' L2 grammar in its non-reflexive (non-locally bound) use.
an empirical l2 perspective on possessives: french/norwegian [87] Turning now to (15), where the reflexive possessive sine is related to the lexical plural possessor bands from…., the results in the same Caen group are quite different.In this case, only three out of 14 participants chose leur*.Six of them opted for a variant of the incorrect stem form s*, while the rest of the group (five participants) either chose a non-possessive variant or did not answer the question.Since the same group had shown earlier in the test that they had in fact learned the correct plural possessor-related form leur, the high percentage of s*-forms for Norwegian sine indicates a strong transfer effect.
In the same vein we occasionally find transfer errors for Fr2 learners' translations from French source texts into Norwegian L1 (test 3) when the Norwegian reflexive si-form is clearly ungrammatical (the example is taken from the Caen immersion group): ( 16) Mais si la politique fait encore partie intégrante de sa i vie, Nicolas Sarkozy i n'oublie pas sa i famille.
Lit.: 'But if politics is still an integrated part of *his.refl(√his.irrefl)life, Nicolas Sarkozy does not forget his.refl family.' The correct forms should be non-reflexive for the first possessive (hans liv), and reflexive for the second (sin familie).This seems to be an example of L2 to L1-transfer (or reverse transfer in the sense of Jarvis & Pavlenko (2008)).
Even in cases where Norwegian uses postnominal possessives, the si*-s*correspondence is early established, with very few errors.In the translation test No1→Fr2 of (17) containing the postnominal sin, all the informants in the Caen group had the translation right, 19/21 in the Oslo group: (17) Hun i opptrådte også ofte med mannen √sin i … Lit.: 'She acted also often with her.refl husband.' Hence, for ( 17), all the Caen informants used the correct form son followed by mari or homme.Son mari in all but one out of 19 in the Oslo group, the error being feminine sa for son in the single case.We conclude that s*-transfer seems to be generalized both for correct (17) cases (positive transfer) and for incorrect ones (negative transfer) (15).H3 above could then be subsumed under the more general H4: H4 Norwegian learners of French generalize the transfer of si* to s* in their L2 grammar. [88] hans petter helland

Cloze test
In order to test further H2 and H3, we combined the translation tests with a monolingual cloze test (test 5) aimed at testing the production of determiners of all kinds given at the end of the first semester of French studies at the University of Oslo during the autumn of 2014 ( 55 [a] Insert determiners if necessary in the following text.Explain the use or the non-use of a determiner in front of the nouns homme politique, mains, écrivain, premier étage, fenêtre (second occurrence) and lune.
There are well known differences between French and Norwegian in such cases.
The tendency is to mark the possessive relation more explicitly in French than in Norwegian.For instance, one could easily find cases like (18) from test 5 which would exhibit definite determiners in corresponding No1-cases like ( 19), but where it's more natural to choose the possessive determiner in French: (18) Quand il i l'a eu dans ses i /??les mains pour la première fois, ses i /??les yeux rayonnaient de joie.Sa i /??la femme est Ø écrivain, et a aidé son i /??le mari à rédiger son i /le livre.
Lit.: 'When he got it in his/(the) hands for the first time, his/(the) eyes shone of joy.His/(the) wife is an author, and helped her/(the) husband to write his/(the) book.' (19) Da han fikk den i hendene for første gang, skinte øynene hans av glede.Kona hans er forfatter og hjalp mannen med å redigere boka.
Unlike French, the Norwegian system is much more flexible for the marking of the possessive relation, relying more heavily on contextual input (see Woldsnes (2013)).
As long as the possessive relation is clear from context, Norwegian tolerates def- an empirical l2 perspective on possessives: french/norwegian [89] inite determiners to a large extent where this choice would seem too vague in French.The informants must also distinguish between (non-marked) reflexive and non-reflexive determiners in French and of course make the distinction between third person singular and plural possessors.Recall that Norwegian does not make the distinction between third person singular and plural possessors for reflexive uses: (20) …. mais ils i n'ont pas encore de garage pour √leur i voiture.
Lit.: '…but they still don't have a garage for their car.' The test group chose the correct form leur in about half of the cases (26 answers containing leur).Because of the tendency in Norwegian to use less specific possessive marking, 18 participants used the (less natural) definite article (la voiture).
Eight of the informants however chose the incorrect sa voiture -again a clear transfer effect -while three of them hesitated between the definite la and plural leur (both options were indicated in the candidates' answer).We see then that the cloze test gives additional support to hypotheses H3 and H4.

Judgment test
The third kind of test we used for our Fr2-informants was a monolingual grammaticality judgment test (test 6) intended for the two groups of Norwegian students of French in France and Norway.The tests were given in November 2016 during the students' first semester of French studies at the University level, either at the University of Oslo or at the University of Caen in an immersion context.In both cases, the tests were given in the classroom and took between twenty and thirty minutes.We had 40 L2 learners of French at the University of Oslo with Norwegian as L1 (in addition to seven informants with Norwegian not as L1), and 15 L2 learners of French in an immersion context at the University of Caen.The students in these groups differed from those doing the translation or cloze tests presented above, although both groups had been exposed to the same teaching and training of determiner syntax and semantics beforehand.Below are listed some relevant test cases (see appendix for the full test): Test 6: Grammaticality judgment test for Norwegian Fr2-learners There are both reflexive (like ( 21)-( 22)) and non-reflexive uses (23).In ( 23), the R(eflexivity)-neutral son is (non-locally) bound from outside the clause (obeying to principle B of Binding Theory, (Chomsky 1981)), but the binder is plural, hence the ungrammaticality of son.The correct form would be leur: (23) Les trois soeurs i vont toutes à la même école.*Son i (√leur i ) école se situe près de la maison.
OSLa volume 9(2), 2017 an empirical l2 perspective on possessives: french/norwegian [91] The informants judge the cases in the test on the basis of three options: correct, incorrect or uncertain.Many results from the judgment test strengthen H3 and H4.Example (2) from the test above takes the form of ( 24 The s-possessive in ( 24), demanding a singular possessor, is of course incorrect and should be replaced by leurs (trois enfants).In the Caen immersion group this time (autumn 2016), we had 15 participants.12 out of them judged the example with the incorrect ses as grammatical, one was uncertain and only two had it right.In (24) the possessive is locally bound, but even in cases where we could not have a reflexive in Norwegian, the same kind of s*-transfer seems to occur.In ( 23), the reflexive possessive is strongly ungrammatical in Norwegian (*sin skole), the correct form being deres (skole).Still 12 out of 40 informants in the Oslo group and 8/15 in the Caen group judged the incorrect son grammatical.The Norwegian Fr2-groups thus still seem to be (unconsciously) influenced by the (partly) false friends si* and s* (see Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017, section 4)) and even overgeneralize the usage of s* in corresponding cases where the s*-form is excluded in Norwegian.
The si*-s*-transfer from Norwegian to French also means that in cases where the s*-possessive is (or should be) used in both languages the success rate of correct correspondences tends to rise.This prediction is borne out.In the judgment test for (25) (test 6), 39 out of 40 informants in the Oslo group judged the possessive son fully grammatical, 15/15 in the Caen (immersion) group: (25) Il i avait oublié √son i sac à la maison.Lit.: 'He had forgotten his bag at home.' Thus, we find support for H3 and H4 from the judgment test, both from negative ( 23)-( 24) and positive transfer ( 25), but positive transfer effects don't indicate by themselves that the possessive system of French has been (fully) internalized.

Possessum-vs. possessor-related possessives
Since Norwegian possessives, contrary to French, are generally possessor oriented, we predict errors relating to the directions of the corresponding referent like the following: (26) *Son maison (for sa maison à lui)/*Son voiture (for sa voiture à lui) 'His house/his car' [92] hans petter helland We might therefore formulate a more general hypothesis like: H5 Norwegian Fr2 learners relate the possessive to the possessor rather than the possessum.
Admittedly, it is much harder to test this hypothesis than H1-H4 above.The problem is actually how to separate common problems of acquiring the gender of the head noun (the possessum) -and hence more directly determiner-noun agreement -from the (anaphoric) orientation of the possessive towards a masculine or feminine possessor.We do however find possible evidence for H5.
In the translation test Norwegian-French (test 4), we have the sentence in ( 27 This might indicate that these informants erroneously take the ses-son-distinction in the coordinated structure of French to mark a gender opposition of possessors.
[9] In both cases the translation of aisance is wrong, but this is irrelevant for our discussion here, hence the N feature.
an empirical l2 perspective on possessives: french/norwegian

Other cases
The tests we have already constructed could be useful also for further acquisition issues between No1 and Fr2.As noted above, there is a strong tendency of marking the possessive relation more frequently in French than in Norwegian (see also Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017, section 3.2)).An example from the cloze test gives us a point at hand: (31) Quand il l'a eu dans…mains pour la première fois, …yeux rayonnaient de joie.
Lit.: 'When he got it in…hands for the first time, …eyes shone of joy.' In this case, it's more natural in French to use possessives than definites: (32) Quand il i l'a eu dans ses i mains pour la première fois, ses i yeux rayonnaient de joie.Lit.: 'When he got it in his hands for the first time, his eyes shone of joy.' The high percentage of definites in the results from the Oslo group shows however that the informants seem to be influenced by their Norwegian L1-system.35/55 opt for the definite (les) in front of mains: (33) Quand il l'a eu dans les mains pour la première fois… Lit.: 'When he got it in the hands for the first time…' In other cases too we see a tendency of less explicit possessive marking in Norwegian than French.This became very clear from (20) above, repeated in (34), for which 18 of 55 informants in the cloze test chose a definite determiner (35) instead of the more natural possessive in (36): OSLa volume 9(2), 2017 [94] hans petter helland (34) …mais ils n'ont pas encore…garage pour…voiture.
Lit.: '…but they still don't have a garage for the/their car.' In a similar vein, Norwegian may have the definite determiner in the source text for translation where French clearly would opt for a possessive: In the Caen group, 4/14 informants chose to keep the definite in their French translation (pour le reste de la vie) instead of the much more natural possessive: pour le reste de leur vie.Only five out of 14 used the leur-form correctly while two made the expected transfer error (pour le reste de *sa vie) and three informants gave no answer at all.Finally, all the French L2+ tests above indicate that the position of the possessive -Norwegian admitting both prenominal and postnominal possessivesdoes not seem to represent a problem at all.In fact, we don't have a single occurrence of Fr2 postnominal possessive in our corpus.Thus, the prediction that the various (prenominal or postnominal) positions of the possessives in the learner's mother tongue (Norwegian as L1) should create problems for her acquisition of the French system is not borne out.This may also well be due to the intervention effect of learning English as L2 before French as L3 in the strict sense ((positive) transfer from L2 to L3).The learner has already acquired a system (English as L2) where possessives are necessarily put in front of the head noun.Regardless of the learner's proficiency in French as L3 (morphological errors, reflexivity parameter, definite or possessive marking etc.), she always puts the possessive determiner in front of the head noun.Hence, even though her L1 grammar allows both preposed and postposed possessives, this option is excluded for her L2 grammar of English and L3 grammar of French.
Paul] i se sont installés à la campagne avec *ses i (√leurs i ) trois enfants.Lit.: 'Claire and Paul moved into the countryside with their three children.' Grieg og Hagerup til Troldhaugen hvor de bodde resten av livet.Lit.: 'In 1884 Grieg and Hagerup moved to Troldhaugen where they lived for the rest of the life.' [4] c o n c l u d i n g r e m a r k s We have observed that Norwegian learners of French L2 tend to mix up the inherent possessor-related dependencies of Norwegian with the possessum-related orientation of French (see Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017, section 4)).Data from different sources (translation, cloze test and judgment tests) show evidence for possessor-related transfer from Norwegian L1 to French L2.Thus, there is a generalized usage of son/sa/ses by Norwegian learners of French L2 both for the reflexive
, section 3.3).[2] It should be mentioned that examples like the starred (4) with plural possessor and reflexive meaning of the non-reflexive form (deres) are in fact easily attested for Norwegian.They are still considered ungrammatical for normative reasons (*De i fant igjen bilen deres i /deres i bil), cf.Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017), section 3.1.
han i seg med Nina Hagerup, som faktisk var kusinen hans i .Lit.: 'In 1867 he married Nina Hagerup who actually was his.irrefl cousin.'Thecorrect translation of kusinen hans is sa cousine, which is neutral with respect to reflexivity (binding conditions) and shows gender and number agreement between possessive and possessum (the following noun).Two participants -one from the Caen group and the other from the Oslo group chose to translate kusinen hans by son cousine instead of the correct sa cousine.These could well be instances of wrong possessor orientation, because in other cases the same informants show that they have indeed acquired the correct feminine forms of the possessive (sa femme -sa Most of the informants, either in the Caen group or the Oslo group, opt for the correct non-reflexive possessives in their translations: hennes sangtalent og hennes dyktighet på scenen.The possessum related possessive in French entails different forms of the possessives ses talents (masculine plural) and son aisance (son in front of a singular feminine noun starting with a vowel).Two of the participants in the Caen group and 5/21 in the Oslo group translate the non-reflexive Norwegian masculine possessive by son: *son musique (instead of the correct sa musique).This might indicate that at least some of these informants relate the possessive *son to a masculine possessor.However, for this latter type of examples it cannot be ruled out that it is just an error of assigning the correct gender to the head noun, taking it to be masculine (as in Norwegian) instead of feminine.All in all, for hypotheses of possessor related possessives in Fr2 -as postulated in H5we must design more solid tests.