Lo sviluppo delle interrogative wh- in russo L2: uno studio trasversale

Acquiring wh- questions is no mean feat for the L2 learner, in so far as they are sentences marked both pragmatically and linguistically. Pragmatically, they are used to request new information, and hence always have an element in focus; structurally, their focus must re- spond to language-specific constraints. This paper hypothesises a staged development of wh- questions in L2 Russian within the framework of Processability Theory (Pienemann et al., 2005). Russian is a multiple fronting language which marks most question words by case, and thus offers an intriguing testing ground. Results of a cross-sectional study of 8 learners at different proficiency levels and from a variety of L1 backgrounds confirm the develop- mental hypotheses. They also reveal further interesting patterns at the interface between the development of wh- questions and that of declaratives in L2 Russian.