Non-Native Grammars: L2 Representation of English Locational and Directional Prepositions Bee Eng Wong and Sharon Yee Ling Chong Department of English Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 Serdang, Selangor Malaysia bee@fbmk.upm.edu.my http://www.fbmk.upm.edu.my/~bee/ Abstract This paper reports a study on the acquisition of English locational and directional prepositions among L1 Malay and L1 Chinese speakers of L2 English. The framework adopted for this study is the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (Hawkins and Chan, 1997). This hypothesis claims that post-childhood L2 learners experience syntactic deficits in the L2 if specific parameterized features present in the functional categories of the L2 are not specified in the L1. However, certain L1 features that correspond to L2 settings can enter L2 syntactic derivations. The study is interesting because the surface structure of English is unlike both Chinese and Malay and the underlying representation of English is like Malay but not Chinese. 103 L1 Malay speakers and 104 L1 Chinese speakers of L2 English from a local university participated in the study. Two tasks were administered to collect data for the study. They were a Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT), and a Directionality Judgment Test (DJT). The former comprised 16 grammatical stimuli (4 with locational prepositions, 4 with directional prepositions and 8 with ambiguous prepositions) and 16 ungrammatical stimuli (4 with locational prepositions, 4 with directional prepositions and 8 with ambiguous prepositions) and 8 distractors. The DJT comprised 6 items with locational prepositions, 6 with directional prepositions and 8 with ambiguous prepositions. The study investigates (a) whether adult L1 Malay and L1 Chinese speakers of L2 English can acquire the surface structure of locational (e.g. in, on, at), directional (into, onto, to), and ambiguous (behind, under, in front of) prepositions , (b) the extent to which L1 Malay and L1 Chinese speakers of L2 English are able to recognize the directional reading of the ambiguous English prepositions that have the same physical manifestation (surface form) as the locational reading, and (c) whether L1 Malay and L1 Chinese speakers of L2 English have a different underlying representation from that of native speakers’ in terms of the prepositional readings (locational and directional). The results suggest that the majority of the L1 Malay and Chinese L2 learners were able to recognize and judge appropriately the surface structure of the grammatical stimuli with English locational and directional prepositions from the ungrammatical ones. In addition, the majority of the two groups of learners were also able to recognize and judge the locational reading with English locational prepositions. However, they become less determinate in their judgments of directional reading with English directional prepositions and the majority of them were unable to recognize and judge the directional reading with ambiguous prepositions. An explanation will be provided and implications drawn for the results obtained. Keywords: Prepositions, Non-Native Grammars, Second Language Acquisition, Locational, Directional, Ambiguous