Learning Swedish adjective agreement in Finnish lower secondary school
Keywords:
Swedish as L2, adjective morphology, formulaic sequencesAbstract
The article studies how well Finnish students in grades 7–9 acquire the Swedish adjective agreement. In Swedish, the adjective agrees with the noun in gender and number. The difference between singular and plural forms is familiar to the students from their mother tongue; however, the grammatical genders (uter and neuter) do not have equivalents in the Finnish language. The students’ mastery of adjective morphology was tested with a cloze test. The test results indicate that the base form, i.e. the singular uter, was mastered overwhelmingly best and was generally used as a default form. The plural form was mastered better than the neuter form. Whether the adjective was in attributive position or in predicative position did not seem to have a significant influence. Forms acquired as chunks were generally known somewhat better than other forms. The differences among grades 7, 8 and 9 were small, whereas individual differences were great.
