Introduction

In recent years, the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research has seen an increasing interest in advanced stages of acquisition and questions of near-native competence, or what is considered as the successful acquisition of a second or foreign language (L2). However, there are still relatively few studies of advanced learners compared to learners at early and intermediate stages of the learning process. The question of whether adult L2 speakers achieve native-like proficiency has been controversial. Moreover, while in many (European) countries the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching at the advanced level is for the students to achieve a near-native command of the target language, it is often left unspecified what native-like proficiency exactly means (de Haan, 1997: 55).

Advanced learners have typically mastered the target language rules of morphology and syntax, but their written production often sounds unidiomatic, even though it may be free from grammatical errors. The exact reasons for this non-nativeness or foreign-soundingness of learner writing seem difficult to pin down, and therefore are frequently explained by using vague cover terms such as 'unidiomaticity' or 'style'. Corpus-based research into learner language has yielded empirical evidence that texts produced by learners and native speakers in fact differ in terms of frequencies of certain words or structures, both in lexico-grammar and syntax. However, an in-depth description of the advanced learner variety with respect to the acquisition of optional and highly L2-specific linguistic phenomena is still a desideratum.

This chapter investigates a syntactic construction which entails both functional principles of discourse organisation (information structure and syntactic weight) and argument realisation.