This study examines the acquisition of kind-referring expressions such as The dodo is extinct. The objective is to investigate whether second language (L2) learners’ acquisition of nominal number marking and articles expressing kind-reference in English is affected by their first language (L1), their L2 proficiency in English, or the syntactic position of the kind-referring noun phrase (NP). L2 learners of English with Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish L1 backgrounds and a control group of native English speakers (NSs) participated in the study. The results from a Fill in the Gaps Task (FGT) and an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) demonstrated that L2 learners were more successful in their production and acceptability judgments when the expression of kind-reference in the target language was similar to that in their L1. The results also showed non-facilitative L1 transfer in the domain of bare singulars, as well as a positive effect of higher L2 proficiency on kind-referring NPs. Finally, the study revealed a subject/object asymmetry in the acquisition of kind-referring NPs in L2 English.

In this paper, we reconsider whether article-less languages have the DP projection, focusing on Tatar. We argue that putative correlations between the presence/absence of articles in a language and various DP-external phenomena (e.g. Left-Branch Extraction, superiority effects, and others), discussed by Bošković and Şener (2014), inter alia, do not hold if a broader range of languages is considered more carefully. Instead, we show that certain correlations obtain between the internal structure, syntactic position, case marking, and interpretation of. noun phrases found in distinct structural environments: direct objects, possessors, and complements of the so-called attributivizers. Specifically, we demonstrate a contrast between two types of nominals: accusative direct objects, possessors in ezafe-3, and complements of certain attributivizers share properties that contrast them with unmarked direct objects, possessors in ezafe-2, and complements of other attributivizers. We argue that postulating the DP projection in the former but not the latter type of noun phrases allows us to account for these observed correlations in a unified way.