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SUBJECT POSITION AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN L2 SPANISH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2018

Covadonga Sánchez Alvarado
Covadonga Sánchez Alvarado*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Covadonga Sánchez Alvarado, University of Massachusetts, 161 Presidents Drive, Herter Hall 416, University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA 01003. E-mail: sancheza@umass.edu
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Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of the constraints regulating subject position in the L2 Spanish spoken by English native speakers and provides a representational account following the premises of the Multiple Grammars (MG) model. The acceptability of preverbal and postverbal subjects is compared considering different discursive contexts (i.e., broad focus, Verbal Phase [VP] focus, and subject focus). Three groups (i.e., native speakers, intermediate learners, and advanced learners), with 28 subjects each, took part in the study. Findings show that advanced speakers behave in a more nativelike manner than intermediate learners. Learners, nonetheless, are not capable of blocking the acceptability of preverbal subjects in those contexts in which native speakers disfavor them and show high productivity levels of underspecified L2 rules that lead them to accept postverbal subjects in infelicitous contexts (e.g., VP focus). These results are consistent with MG, the representation model proposed by Amaral and Roeper (2014), because an acquisition path can be described using simple rules with lexical or pragmatic restrictions, which may be targetlike. Optionality can be explained considering that L1 and L2 rules coexist and are never deleted, simply assigned different productivity levels or blocked.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 781 - 803
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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