Object clitics in French second language acquisition

This paper investigates syntactic knowledge of object clitics by native adult English L2 French speakers. In French, object pronominalization can be realised through clitics and French clitics precede inflected verbs. However, English has only strong pronouns and they occur post verbally. These differences related to object pronominalization cause learnability problems for L2 learners (Hamann et al. 1966; Jakubowicz & Rigaut, 2000; Perez-Leroux et al. 2009). This study shows that the L2 learners accepted object omitted constructions in which clitics were also omitted. Similar results have been reported by Grüter & Crago (2011) by examining L2 child French.