Passive Constructions – Strangers among L1 Speakers of Hungarian?

• Main Author: Tankó Enikő
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2017-12-01
• Series: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica
• Subjects: sla; l3 acquisition; passive voice; bilingualism
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/ausp-2017-0021

Does knowledge of Romanian, more exactly of Romanian passive voice, help learning the English passive construction? Or is it the other way round: knowledge of English helps students learning Romanian? Perhaps L2 and L3 mutually influence each other in the case of Hungarian students from Miercurea Ciuc? In previous studies addressing the problems encountered by L1 speakers of Hungarian in the acquisition of the English passive voice (Tankó 2011, 2014), I presumed that possessing Romanian to various degrees represented a facilitating factor in the acquisition of the passive given that Romanian, like English, has a well-developed, explicitly-taught passive construction. Of course, speakers of Hungarian living in Romania might be influenced to some extent by their knowledge of Romanian when learning the English passive voice - yet, the question is to what extent. Thus, an important element of this study represents identifying students’ level of Romanian and their production of Romanian BE-passive and SE-passive.