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Subject-to-subject raising and the syntax of tense in L2 Spanish: A Full Access approach*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

GONZALO CAMPOS-DINTRANS ,
ACRISIO PIRES  and
JASON ROTHMAN
GONZALO CAMPOS-DINTRANS*
Affiliation:
Catholic University of America
ACRISIO PIRES
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
JASON ROTHMAN
Affiliation:
University of Florida
*
Address for correspondence: Gonzalo Campos-Dintrans, Modern Languages and Literatures Department, McMahon 402, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer “to seem/to appear” in different tenses, with and without experiencers, and with Tense Phrase (TP), verb phrase (vP) and Adjectival Phrase (AP) complements. The results show that advanced L2 learners can perform just like native Spanish speakers regarding grammatical knowledge in this domain, although the subtle differences between both languages are not explicitly taught. We argue that these results support Full Access approaches to Universal Grammar (UG) in L2 acquisition, by providing evidence that uninterpretable syntactic features can be learned in adult L2, even when such features are not directly instantiated in the same grammatical domain in the L1 grammar.

Keywords

acquisitionsyntaxraisingSpanishEnglish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 38 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Sam Epstein and William Davies for their interest and suggestions regarding this paper, the audience at SLRF 2009, where the initial experimental results from this project were originally presented. We also thank Joshua Thoms, for help with data collection, Mike Iverson for help with the statistical analysis, and several anonymous reviewers whose suggestions led to improvements in the analysis presented in the paper. Any and all errors and oversights are inadvertent and entirely our own.

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