Elena Valenzuela

Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish

This paper reports on an experiment investigating the acquisition of Spanish, a language that has a gender feature for nouns and gender agreement for determiners and adjectives, by speakers of a first language (L1) that also has gender (French), as well as an L1 that does not (English). Number (present in all three languages) is also investigated. Subjects were adult learners of Spanish, at three levels of proficiency, as well as a control group of native speakers. Oral production data were elicited. Subjects were also tested on an interpretation task, in which the selection of pictures corresponding to particular sentences depends on number and gender contrasts. The results from both tasks show significant effects for proficiency; low proficiency groups differ significantly from native speakers, but advanced and intermediate groups do not. There were no significant effects for L1 or for prior exposure to another second language with gender. The findings are discussed in the context of two different theories as to the possibility of parameter resetting in nonnative acquisition, namely, the failed functional features hypothesis and the full transfer full access hypothesis. The results are consistent with the latter hypothesis.

Eventive and stative passives in Spanish L2 acquisition: A matter of aspect

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined knowledge of eventive and stative passives in the L2 Spanish grammar of L1 speakers of English. Although the two types of passive exist in English, the difference between them is not signaled in any specific way. In Spanish, in contrast, the distinction is marked by the choice of copula: ser is used to form eventive passives, estar for statives. Researchers agree that the two copulas, both of which translate as English “to be”, differ in relation to aspect: estar is perfective while ser is not marked for aspect (Schmitt, 1992). The question was whether L2 learners would be able to acquire the aspectual difference of the copulas and apply it to the formation of the passives. Two main tests were used, a Grammaticality Judgment Task and a Sentence Selection Task. The Grammaticality Judgment Task examined properties of the passives related, among other things, to aspect and agentivity. The Sentence Selection Task focused on the interpretation of the subject: only the subject of ser can be interpreted as generic. Although the learners in general distinguished between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, they had not acquired the restriction on subject interpretation. These results are explained in terms of interfaces.

L1/L2 Spanish grammars and the pragmatic deficit hypothesis

In recent research on primary (L1) and non-primary (L2) acquisition,special attention has been given to whether syntactic development is subject to a continuity condition. While it has been proposed that the continuity condition applies to both L1 and L2 syntactic growth,the changes that take place in developing grammars have sometimes been attributed to other cognitive systems. Specifically, it has been proposed that child grammars are ‘underspecified’ because they lack a pragmatic principle which determines the range of indices available for establishing verbal and nominal coreference. According to this proposal, a grammar which is underspecified for Number has null subjects and bare NPs only with non-inflected verb forms. Assuming that adults will not have a pragmatic deficit of the kind proposed for children, we have analysed data from child L1 Spanish and adult L2 Spanish. The results of our analysis show that: (1) in child L1 Spanish, the feature Person may encode Number so that when Person is distinctively implemented, root infinitives and bare NP subjects will cease to occur. However, the pervasive morphology of Spanish verbs conspires against the possibility of providing clear-cut evidence for underspecification in the case of child Spanish; (2) the different nature of L1 and L2 root infinitives may provide partial evidence for underspecification in the case of L1 Spanish; and (3) in the case of L2 learners, the distribution of null and overt subjects seems to be partially determined by their L1 rather than by underspecification.