The acquisition of Arabic scrambling dative structures by English learners \

الملخص EN

This paper represents an empirical study to investigate the ability of L2 learners to acquire structures that are not allowed by their L1 grammar.

An experiment was made with 40 native speakers of English majoring at two proficiency levels: pre-intermediate and upper-intermediate.

These participants completed written judgment tasks, which included 24 scrambling dative sentences, to judge their grammaticality in Arabic.

The collected data was discussed based on the Full-Transfer/ Full Access approach and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis.

The statistical analysis showed no significant disparities between native speakers and L2 learners in acquiring L2 structures, which can be indicated as a sign of the fact that L2 learners acquired the structures that are not allowed in their L1.

Keywords: Dative alternation, prepositional dative construction, double objective dative construction, scrambling dative sentences, second language learners, the Full-Transfer/ Full Access approach, the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis