Cristóbal Lozano

Interface Conditions on Postverbal Subjects: A Corpus Study of L2 English.

This paper investigates how syntactic knowledge interfaces with other cognitive systems by analysing the production of postverbal subjects, V(erb)–S(ubject) order, in an L1 Spanish–L2 English corpus and a comparable English native corpus. VS order in both native and L2 English is shown to be constrained by properties operating at three interfaces: (i) lexicon–syntax: the verb is unaccusative (Unaccusative Hypothesis); (ii) syntax–discourse: the subject is focus (End-Focus Principle) and (iii) syntax–phonology: the subject is heavy (End-Weight Principle). We show that, since learners produce VS under the same interface conditions as native speakers, unaccusativity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for VS production. However, learners overproduce VS and make persistent errors in their syntactic encoding. Our findings support recent proposals that these difficulties stem from problems at coordinating syntactic knowledge with knowledge from other external systems, but they suggest that the nature of such difficulties is not external to the syntax.

Postverbal subjects at the interfaces in Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English: a corpus analysis

The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE subcorpora (Italian and Spanish). The question has been dealt with before in the literature with emphasis on the production of ngrammatical inversion structures in L2 English of speakers from a variety of L1s, but in quite a scattered, unsystematic and rather intuitive fashion. Our approach seeks to identify the conditions under which learners produce inverted subjects. Based on previous research findings and our review of the theoretical literature, we hypothesise that for Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English, there is a tendency for subject inversion to occur when: the verb is unaccusative (H1), the subject is long or “heavy” (H2), and the subject is new (or relatively new) information or “focus” (H3). While H1 has found confirmation in the L2 literature, H2 and H3 have, to our knowledge, been untested and the facts they describe gone unnoticed in previous research. Our results show that the three conditions are met in the writing of Spanish and Italian L2 speakers of English, despite errors in the syntactic encoding of the structures concerned. Thus, a full account of the production of inverted subjects in L2 English must look at properties which operate at (i) the lexicon-syntax interface, (ii) the syntaxphonology interface, and (iii) the syntax-discourse interface.

The Development of Anaphora Resolution at the Syntax-Discourse Interface: Pronominal Subjects in Greek Learners of Spanish

This study explores the development of anaphora resolution (AR) in late sequential bilinguals, namely, adult Greek learners of Spanish at three proficiency levels (intermediate, lower advanced, upper advanced). The use of an overt/null pronominal subject anaphor is investigated in three discourse contexts: topic-continuity (a single antecedent requiring a null pronoun), contrastive-focus (two same-gender potential antecedents requiring an overt pronoun to avoid ambiguity) and emphatic (three same-gender potential antecedents showing unclear preference for either overt or null pronoun). Crucially, AR behaves similarly in Greek and Spanish. Results from an offline contextualised acceptability judgement task show that similarity between the learner’s first (L1) and second (L2) languages does not necessarily facilitate the learning task. Even very advanced learners show deficits, which are selective since not all discursive contexts are equally affected. The results are better accounted for by general pragmatic economy principles: Learners prefer being redundant (overuse of overt pronouns in topic-continuity contexts) to ambiguous (acceptance of null pronouns in contrastive-focus contexts). Such tolerance for redundancy may reflect a more general pragmatic tendency, as also reported in child L1 development, adult L2 development and also in native grammars.

Learner corpora as a research tool for the investigation of lexical competence in L2 Spanish

This article presents a state-of-the-art discussion of second language (L2) Spanish corpus-based research on lexical competence. While L2 Spanish learner corpus research (LCR) is still in its infancy, we will review the major findings of relevant studies on the production of several lexical aspects: copula choice with ser/estar; overt/null pronoun distribution; collocations and lexico-syntactic verbal competence. Due to the highly contextualised nature of learner corpus data, many of these studies show that learners do not always behave differently from natives in terms of frequency of use, though they may differ in terms of discursive and pragmatic uses. The article ends with some theoretical and methodological caveats about L2 Spanish learner corpus research. An argument is made for the need to conduct L2 corpus-based research which (1) is theoretically motivated and explanatory (as opposed to descriptive and pedagogical), (2) uses fine-grained annotation (as opposed to coarse-grained, general tagsets),...

Second Language Acquisition of Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax

This article examines how developmental patterns found in second language (L2) acquisition result from a complex interaction of influence from the first language (L1) and input from the L2 under constraints imposed by an innate language faculty. Evidence comes from a large body of research on L2 phonology, morphology and syntax.

From Corpora to Experiments: Methodological Triangulation in the Study of Word Order at the Interfaces in Adult Late Bilinguals (L2 learners)

This paper shows the need to triangulate different approaches in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research to fully understand late bilinguals’ interlanguage grammars. Methodologically, we show how experimental and corpus data can be (and should be) triangulated by reporting on a corpus study (Lozano and Mendikoetxea in Biling Lang Cognit 13(4):475–497, 2010) and a new follow-up offline experiment investigating Subject–Verb inversion (Subject–Verb/Verb–Subject order) in L1 Spanish–L2 English (n = 417). Theoretically, we follow a recent line in psycholinguistic approaches to Bilingualism and SLA research (Interface Hypothesis, Sorace in Linguist Approaches Biling 1(1):1–33, 2011). It focuses on the interface between syntax and language-external modules of the mind/brain (syntax-discourse [end-focus principle] and syntax-phonology [end-weight principle]) as well as a language-internal interface (lexicon-syntax [unaccusative hypothesis]). We argue that it is precisely this multi-faceted interface approach (corpus and experimental data, core syntax and the interfaces, representational and processing models) that provides a deeper understanding of (i) the factors that favour inversion in L2 acquisition in particular and (ii) interlanguage grammars in general.