Egennamn, morfologi och andraspråksinlärning

Proper names make up quite a large proportion of the words in the course
books judging by Coctaill, a corpus consisting of course books used to teach
adults Swedish as a second or foreign language. However proper names are
rarely treated explicitly in second language teaching, and are also seldom
treated in research about second language acquisition.
Learning proper names for countries and places is an important part of
learning a language. Löfdahl et al. (2015) have noted that sometimes
learners might even learn appellative words based on proper names, e.g.
learning the Swedish word torg ‘square’ based on place names like
Opaltorget. In this paper I analyse proper names based on a morphological
analysis of the structure of proper nouns in course books (the Coctaill
corpus) and in learner essays (the SweLL pilot corpus) made within a larger
project (Developing Lexical and Grammatical Competences in Immigrant
Swedish). I present a study of the use of proper names in course books and
learner essays and discuss how proper names might affect the acquisition of
Swedish as a second language. I suggest that the role of proper names in L2
acquisition needs to be studied further and that this is also related to the
question of whether proper names have meaning (cf. Nyström 1997, 2016).
I also suggest that we should teach learners to analyse place names into
parts which they might be able to use in learning the language. Further
research is needed regarding how aware first and second language speakers
are of morphemes in words and names, but I show that previous research
has shown signs of awareness and that course book input indicates that this
may mean that proper names ought to be given more attention in second
language teaching.