| The purpose of this research was to analyze an aspect of a non-native speaker's interlanguage in order to provide a generalizable description of the phenomenon of interlanguage and reveal the sources of the learner's variable linguistic behavior.;The researcher met with the informant for a period of nine months. The spontaneous conversations conducted during those meetings were tape recorded to provide the data for the study.;An analysis of the data based on the traditional morpho-syntactic description of the noun system in English revealed that the learner's forms exhibit a certain degree of systematicity. The same type of analysis revealed that, even though systematic to a certain extent, the learner's nominal system is also variable.;Since the traditional grammatical tools of analysis did not allow for an explanation of the sources of the learner's variable linguistic performance in English, an alternative way of analyzing the data (i.e. with the use of cognitive grammar) was then explored.;That form of analysis revealed that variable forms in the learner's interlanguage form a system consistent with the system of nominal imagery possibilities outlined by Talmy and that they result from the alternative imagery that cognition makes available to us. |
