Acquisition of auxiliary selection in Italian by native Russian speakers

This thesis proposes investigating the possible implications of the Unaccusative Hypothesis on the acquisition of verbal syntax of Italian L2 by native Russian speakers. Although both these languages have unaccusative verbs, their distribution and morphosyntactic features may vary significantly causing potential cases of language interference. This study intends to show how the instances of wrong selections of perfective auxiliary with intransitive verbs operated by native Russian learners can be accounted for by the differences in morphosyntactic representation of split intransitivity in these two languages and their semantics. Combining the methods of contrastive analysis of the morphosyntactic and semantic features of correspondent Italian and Russian intransitive verbs with the experimental evidence from native Russian learners of Italian L2, this thesis intends to investigate the potential application of the Unaccusative Hypothesis to second language learning.