First and Second Language Acquisition of German Relative Clauses

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject Didactics for the subject German - German as a Foreign Language, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen, language: English, abstract: The intention of this thesis is to show the differences between L1 and L2 acquisition. The focus here is on the acquisition of relative clauses, which is mastered comparatively late by both L1 and L2 learners due to its complexity.

The first part of the thesis is theoretical and will provide an overview of how children acquire relative clauses in German as their mother tongue, and how that differs from young children and adults learning relative constructions in German as a second language. In the second part, an empirical-qualitative corpus analysis will be carried out. For this purpose, test examples from the MERLIN corpus were used with focus on the production of relative clause sentences written by L2 learners. The results of the corpus analysis will be compared with the theories found in relevant literature. In addition, the MERLIN corpus is intended to provide insights into the written application of relative clause structures in L2 learners.