Infinitival subordination in Spanish: A study of Control, Raising and ECM constructions in bilingual and non-native acquisition (original) (raw)
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Are we under control? Acquisition of control structures in L2 English and Spanish
Cuadernos de Lingüística XII. Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset. 121–137., 2005
In this study we aim to investigate the acquisition of English and Spanish control structures by adult L2 learners of English and Spanish, that is, complex structures which typically show a relation of referential dependence between an unexpressed subject (the controlled element) of the embedded clause and an expressed or unexpressed constituent (the controller) of the matrix clause . We will be focusing on the effect of the interaction between syntactic and semantic factors, directionality (that is, effect of the L1 on L2 acquisition) and on L2 acquisition of control structures compared to L1 acquisition of control structures.
Cusa, Alejandro and Pedro Fuentes (eds.) Language Acquisition and Contact in the Iberian Peninsula. Mouton de Gruyter, 2018
This study aims to investigate knowledge of a heritage language (HL), i.e. the language of origin of bilingual speakers who grow up in the context of migration with exposure to the HL and the dominant language of the host country. We focus on European Portuguese (EP), and concentrate on bi-clausal infinitival complements of causative and perception verbs. These may have different forms depending on whether the infinitival complement is inflected or uninflected. In particular, the subject may be Nominative or Accusative. Two experimental tasks were applied, a Completion Task and an Acceptability Judgment Task, to a total of 60 adult informants: 30 native speakers raised in a monolingual context, and 30 heritage speakers (HSs), raised in a bilingual context with EP as home language and German as environmental language. Overall both groups demonstrate an evident preference for Accusative over Nominative Case marked subjects, regardless of the presence of inflection on the infinitive. Concerning the monolingual group, the most striking result regards the residual rates of Nominative Case marked subjects in the presence of an inflected infinitive in both tasks. This result is unexpected under standard assumptions concerning clause structure in EP. We offer an alternative analysis based on the idea that pre-verbal Nominative Case marked subjects in EP are (typically) left-dislocated topics (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou l998; Barbosa 1995). Left-dislocated topics in EP are assigned Nominative Case by default. On this view, preference for avoiding a Nominative subject in the presence of an inflected infinitive reduces to preference for the operation of raising to object over the last resort operation of default (Nominative) Case assignment. This preference can be viewed as an instance of the Paninian principle Blocking, whereby a general, default form is blocked by the existence of a more specific rival form. In this case, the default Case option is blocked by the more specific operation of raising to object. The most significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals concerns a higher rate of acceptance of Nominative pronouns by HSs, including in uninflected infinitives. This means that, on a par with the predominant raising to object option, the HSs allow for the default Case strategy; i.e., they fail to apply blocking. This strategy has also been attested in early stages of the acquisition of these constructions by EP monolingual children (Santos et al. 2016), a fact that reinforces the view that the process of acquisition of the HL is native-like in the sense that it goes through the same stages as the process of monolingual acquisition. However, by retaining an option that is no longer available in mature grammars, the HSs reveal protracted development.
Second Language Research, 2020
This article provides a Poverty of Stimulus argument for the participation of a dedicated linguistic module in second language acquisition. We study the L2 acquisition of a subset of English infinitive complements that exhibit the following properties: (i) they present an intricate web of grammatical constraints while they also (ii) are highly infrequent in corpora, (iii) lack visible features that would make them salient, and (iv) are communicatively superfluous. We report on an experiment testing the knowledge of some infinitival constructions by near-native adult L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers. Learners demonstrated a linguistic system that includes contrasts based on subtle restrictions in the L2, including aspect restrictions in Raising to Object. These results provide evidence that frequency and other cognitive or environmental factors are insufficient to account for the acquisition of the full spectrum of English infinitivals. This leads us to the conclusion that a domain-specific linguistic faculty is required.
One of the main issues in teaching the acquisition of complex language structures to students of a foreign language is what is known as language interference, language transfer, or cross-linguistic influence (CLI). While there is not a consensus amongst researchers on a specific, short definition of what this phenomenon is, there is a certain agreement on what it entails. According to Théophanous (140), two main categories of mistakes which are generally treated separately can be traditionally made out in L2: a. Interlingual mistakes, attributable exclusively to interferences of the mother tongue (L1) (or of another tongue known by the learner) in learning the target language, and studied by means of contrastive analysis. b. Intralingual mistakes, attributable to the intrinsic characteristics of the L2, which can also affect children who are learning their L1. This categorization seems mostly reasonable, except for the fact that Théophanous places (in parentheses, in a.) mistakes caused by the phenomenon of cross-linguistic interference in third language acquisition under the same category of mistakes as those caused by the phenomenon of CLI in L2 acquisition. Grosjean, Cook and Jessner have stated -separately- (qtd. in Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner) that ... from a psycholinguistic perspective, third language acquisition research presents specific characteristics derived from the fact that third language learners are experienced learners and also because bilingual and multilingual individuals present a different type of competence as compared tothat of monolinguals This disagreement is an instance of the lack of consistency in the literature concerning CLI; in general, there is relatively little written on the subject regarding monolinguals learning a L2, or bilinguals learning a third language. Authors seem content to put learners of a foreign language together in one group, regardless of their background in terms of their total or partial knowledge of other languages. The present paper deals mostly with Théophanous’ first proposed category above, without taking into account any other language known by the learner, since the majority of subjects whose examples are used in this paper were monolingual English speakers. In particular, I will attempt to show the issue of CLI in learning one very specific structure, the present subjunctive mood, by first and second-year monolingual college students in the United States who are mostly native English speakers. Students who take lower-division Spanish courses include often a few heritage speakers of Spanish who use English as L1; however, I did not use examples produced by anyone in this latter group to illustrate my point, since they belong to Théophanous’ second proposed category above. I will try to make a case through the presentation, classification and analysis of several examples of written and spoken language collected throughout my almost eight years of experience as a first and second-year college Spanish instructor. Some ways of bringing this issue to the student's attention based on the concepts covered by Doughty and William's Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition will be suggested towards the end, as a way to suggest a change in the current teaching paradigm in order to make the acquisition process of this structure more effective. Regarding L3 CLI, it needs to be clarified that the issue of heritage speakers who as young children produced structures atypical of monolingual children of the same age, and which sounded as if they were coming from the child's other language (an issue to which Döpke refers below) is more related to the subject of simultaneously bilingual children (SBC), in spite of the fact that these heritage speakers rarely consider themselves bilingual, so they, in general, cannot be considered SBC (and hence they end up frequently in lower-division Spanish classes). This means that I consider the production of structures showing CLI by heritage speakers to be the subject of a different research altogether.