Second Language Acquisition of non-nominative subjects in Spanish

Our main goal is to analyse the interlanguage of our students with respect to the acquisition of pronominal subjects, based on their discourse function, and of null subjects. Data will be provided as a result of designed tests with translations and grammaticality judgements (according to Sorace 1996). We address the following questions: (1) Which specific characteristics of interlanguage do these students share? Is it possible to identify different patterns according to different evolution/level of students? (2) In case of interlinguistic errors, is it because of L1 interference errors? or because of development errors? Or both? (3) Can a formal typology of topics and foci help students acquire and entrench both explicit and null pronouns? (Jiménez-Fernández 2014a).

2012

The paper provides novel converging acquisitional and empirical evidence from Spanish in support of the hypothesis that preverbal subjects in Spanish can, but need not, be left-dislocated constituents in the CP layer; they can occupy the canonical subject position, Spec,TP, contrary to what is often assumed in the literature. On the basis of acquisitional and statistical evidence gathered from a longitudinal study of five children, the paper argues against Grinstead’s (1998 et seq. ) claim that overt subjects emerge in development concurrently with less controversially CP-related phenomena such as wh- questions and dislocations. Moreover, based on the different distributional behavior of genuine subjects and dislocations/foci in the context of desiderative/exhortative sentences introduced by que ‘that,’ the paper argues that Spec,TP/AgrSP is indeed available in Spanish and can only host bona fide subjects to the exclusion of non-subject XPs.

C. Perez-Vidal, M. Juan Garau, & A. Bel i Gaya (eds.), A Portrait of the Young in the New Multilingual Spain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters., 2007

2003

2009

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.

Data collection was funded by UCMEXUS and CONACYT (Mexico) (Grant No. CN0255). We express our gratitude to research assistant, Matt Kanwit of UGA, to Jien Chen and Wei Zhang of the Statistical Consulting Center of UGA, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Any remaining errors are ours.

Second Language Research, 1999

Recent developments within the so-called Principles and Parameters model of acquisition argue for a clear-cut separation of Universal Grammar (UG) principles from parametric options and locate all parameters within functional categories (Borer, 1984; Lebeaux, 1988; Chomsky, 1991). This has led Tsimpli and Roussou (1991) to propose that adult L2 (second language) learners have access to UG principles but do not reset the parameters of the L2, which amounts to saying that null subjects in the adult Spanish L2 may or may not have the same status as native Spanish null subjects, depending on the speakers’ L1 (first language) and the UG principles at stake. In the case of L1 acquisition, Rizzi (1994) and Hyams (1994) provide a competence account of null subjects in early child English which relate them to adult English Diary Drop and German-style topic-drop rather than to Spanish-style pro-drop. They specifically argue that these missing subjects are restricted to the first position of n...

RAEL Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada, 2013

Research has shown that adult learners of L2 Spanish whose L1 is a non-null subject language know from relatively early that null and postverbal subjects are allowed in Spanish. However, the properties that constrain the native use of subjects at the syntaxdiscourse interface tend to cause persistent difficulty. This study explores the development of both syntactic and discourse subject properties of three level groups of British adult L2 Spanish learners in an instructional setting through a contextualised judgement task. Results show that adult L2 learners of Spanish acquire the relevant L2 feature specifications which constrain purely syntactic contrasts but present a delay in the discourse subject properties, particularly in the interpretation of backward anaphora in null/overt pronominal subjects in embedded clauses and the presentational focus/neutral environment distinction in postverbal subjects with unergative and unaccusative verbs. Processing difficulties and lack of positive evidence in the type of input present in instructional settings might explain the results.

Language Learning and Development, 2021

In many so-called canonical null subject languages, null and overt subject pronouns have contrasting referential preferences: null subjects tend to maintain reference to the preceding subject while overt pronominal subjects do not. We propose that children acquire this contrast by initially restricting their attention to 1st and 2nd person pronouns, whose reference is simpler to infer compared to 3rd person pronouns. We provide supporting evidence from spontaneous production and comprehension in Mexico City Spanish, showing that (i) the null/overt contrast is in principle acquirable from simply observing the referential preferences of 1st and 2nd person subject pronouns in caretaker speech; (ii) children themselves condition subject pronoun expression on pronoun reference in the 1st and 2nd persons before doing so in the 3rd person; and (iii) children use the null/overt contrast in comprehension at a similar age when they begin making this distinction in production.