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Eventive and stative passives: the role of transfer in the acquisition of ser and estar by German L1 speakers

Eventive and stative passives: the role of transfer in the acquisition of ser and estar by German L1 speakers

Joyce Bruhn de Garavito and Elena Valenzuela
The University of Western Ontario
joycebg@uwo.ca, evalenzu@uwo.ca

Although the acquisition of verbal and adjectival passives has been the subject of a great deal of research in first language acquisition it has not received much attention in second language research. In Spanish, the two types of passive relate directly to one of the most difficult areas of acquisition: the differences between the copular verbs ser and estar. As the examples in (1) show, ser is used with a participle to express an eventive passive, while estar with a participle expresses a state. The passive with ser allows the presence of an agent (Luján 1981), while estar does not. Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela ( 2005; 2006) showed that even when learners performed at ceiling with adjectives, they exhibited a great deal of difficulty distinguishing the use of the two copulas with participles. This in spite of the fact that the two types of passive exist in English, the L1 of the learners, although the difference is not overtly marked in this language.
(1) a. La comida fue servida por un mesero muy simpático.
The dinner was served by a very nice waiter.
b. La comida está servida (*por un mesero muy simpático).
The dinner is served (*by a very nice waiter).
In this paper we will examine the acquisition of the two passives by learners whose L1 encodes the difference in a way very similar to Spanish. As seen below, German expresses an eventive passive with the verb werden, while an adjectival passive takes the verb sein (Kratzer, 2000; Examples from Abbot-Smith and Behrens, 2006).
(2) a. Der Reis war gekocht.
The rice was cooked (in a state of being cooked)
b. Der Reis wurde gekocht.
The rice was (went through a process) of being cooked.
The inclusion of learners whose L1 is similar to the L2 will allow us to tease apart the cause of the difficulty encountered by the English L1 speakers. Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela argued that it was caused by differences between English and Spanish participles, and not because of the copulas. However, there is now widespread agreement that the difference between the copulas is aspectual, both in German (see Abbot-Smith and Behrens 2006) and in Spanish (Luján 1981; Lema 1992; Schmitt 1992). Aspect has been found to be problematic for English L2 learners (Montrul and Slabakova 2003). Transfer from the L1 would predict that the German learners would have no problems with the Spanish.
The experiment included two groups of speakers, a group of L2 German learners of Spanish (n=15) and a control group (n=10). The learners completed three tasks: a grammaticality judgment task, a truth value judgment task, and a translation task, besides a placement test and a language profile. We predict that transfer cannot explain the results. Rather, it is possible that aspectual distinctions, which lie at the syntax/semantics interface, may not be easily accessed either from the input or from the L1.

Adult Acquisition of Infinitives in Spanish by Nahuatl speakers

Adult Acquisition of Infinitives in Spanish by Nahuatl speakers
Alma P. Ramírez-Trujillo
The University of Western Ontario
aramire@uwo.ca

Within the generative framework, it has been proposed that when two languages are acquired simultaneously, two grammatical systems are developed. Nevertheless, crosslinguistic influence, that is, the influence of one language on another, may take place (Hulk and Müller 2000; Müller and Hulk 2001). In this paper I investigate the acquisition of Spanish infinitives by Nahuatl speakers (Spanish/Nahuatl bilingual speakers and speakers of Spanish as a second language whose first language is Nahuatl). I will discuss whether learners are able to ‘delearn’ some aspects of their native language in order to acquire a simplified form of a more complex structure that is already present in their first language.
Spanish, unlike Nahuatl, is a language with infinitives (see example 1); therefore, every verb has a non-conjugated form which is morphologically marked. On the other hand, Nahuatl is an agglutinative language with no infinitives but a root that works like a bound morpheme, that is, a morpheme that does not have meaning by itself if it is not accompanied by something else such as agreement or tense morphemes (see example 2).
1) Yo no quiero ir a la cama sin comer
I-pro neg want-1st inf-to go to the bed without inf-eat
‘I do not want to go to bed without eating’

2) a. Ni- k- neki ni- choca-s
1st p. Obj.Agr. want-pres 1st p. cry-fut
‘I want to cry’

b. *Yo lloro yo quiero (Nahuatl sentence is ungrammatical in Spanish
English)

Since in the Spanish infinitive constructions we have a conjugated verb accompanied by an infinitive verb, I propose that, in this type of structures, there is just one tense phrase (TP). However, in the case of Nahuatl, where we have two conjugated verbs together, we have a structure with two TP’s. As a consequence of this, Nahuatl speakers have to delearn one TP in order to produce the Spanish infinitive constructions. I will report on an experiment carried out in Mexico where speakers of Nahuatl (n=26) were asked to answer a grammaticality judgement task that compared phrases like the ones showed above in 2a and 2b, and a production task in which participants were asked to describe pictures that elicited infinitive constructions. I expect to contribute evidence to the validation of the hypothesis of crosslinguistic influence due to language contact.

Migración temporal: un factor importante para repensar las lenguas en contacto

Migración temporal: un factor importante para repensar las lenguas en contacto
Maria Eugenia de Luna Villalón

Canadá es reconocido por sus políticas de inmigración y establecimiento que incluyen clases de inglés o francés como segunda lengua para ayudar a los recien llegados en su proceso de adaptación e integración; reconociendo de esta manera que la competencia lingüística es crucial para la inclusión social de los inmigrantes. Sin embargo, las leyes migratorias no contemplan este tipo de ayuda para los migrantes temporales que vienen a Canadá con programas como el de los Trabajadores Agrícolas Temporales (PTAT).
EL PTAT ha estado en función desde los años 60’s y su objetivo principal es abordar la falta de trabajadores no calificados en las granjas de Canadá ‘importando’ trabajadores agrícolas temporales del Caribe y México. El programa se ha convertido en un modelo de de cooperación internacional (para los estados) porque ayuda a tener flujos migratorios temporales respetables y regulados que remplazan la migración ilegal y no deseada (Basok, 2000).
El propósito principal de este estudio es atender la falta de investigación sociolingüística en los migrantes temporales, a través de un estudio de lenguaje y migración que reuna y analice los hechos sociolingüísticos de los trabajadores agrícolas temporales mexicanos que vienen a Ontario y Quebec a través del PTAT.
Mi hipótesis de investigación es: La deficiente o inexistente competencia lingüística, del lenguaje de la mayoría, en un ambiente de lenguas en contacto, es la manifestación de la exclusión y segregación de los trabajadores agrícolas mexicanos en Canadá.
Las preguntas de Investigación son:

1. ¿Cómo perciben los participantes su identidad etnolingüística en un escenario multilingüe?

2. ¿Qué barreras lingüísticas enfrentan y cómo afecta esto su vida diaria?

3. ¿Cómo es que sus antecedentes personales –capital humano, social y lingüístico- restringen o permiten la renegociación de su identidad para poder lidear con su nuevo ambiente social y lingüístico?

4. ¿Qué habilidades lingüísticas han adquirido o perdido en su estancia en Canadá?

5. ¿Han sido renegociadas las actitudes lingüísticas de los participantes y sus familias?

Crosslinguistic Influences in the Acquisition of Spanish L3.

Crosslinguistic Influences in the Acquisition of Spanish L3.
Patricia Bayona

This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation where I examined written production in L3 Spanish in learners with a typologically similar L2 (French) and a typologically more distant L1 (English). The corpus of the study consisted of un-aided compositions produced by participants who have English as a first language and French as a second language. The innovative methodology focused on the statistical analysis of the combination of two tools: a linguistic profile and an error database. The linguistic profile provided data regarding the language acquisition history of the subjects as well as a self-assessment of their level of exposure to the second and third languages. The error database was compiled through the analysis of error of the subjects’ compositions, while considering only the crosslinguistic influences amongst the participants’ linguistic repertoire. It was found that there is a number of strong links between the characteristics of the written production and the level of exposure to the L2 that the learners declare to have had. In other words we were able to establish a series of correlations between the amount of exposure to the L2 and the number of CLI in the L3 (Bayona, 2009).
The findings of the study confirm that learners of foreign languages are simultaneously activating their previously learned languages lexicon at the moment of producing a written text in an L3 (See also Cenoz et al, 2003), and that their social and academic background are influential factors in the production of crosslinguistic influences.

Copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: a “transfer” account.

Copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: a “transfer” account.

A. Alba de la Fuente, University of Ottawa
R. Fernández Fuertes, Universidad de Valladolid
J. M. Liceras, Universidad de Ottawa

The debate on whether the omission of subjects in child language is to be accounted for syntactically (Hyams and Wexler 1993) or is the result of a processing deficit (Valian 1991, Valian and Eisenberg 1996) has been extrapolated to copula omission by Becker (2002, 2004). This author argues that the differences in the use of overt copula be versus null copula be in child English rather than being a product of sentence length are determined by the semantic nature of the predicate as in (1) versus (2).

(1) lady __ on that (Nina, 2;02)

(2) this is lady (Naomi, 2;02)

Locative predicates, as the Prepositional Phrase in (1), are aspectual and it is their Aspectual Phrase that provides temporal anchoring to the sentence (Guéron and Hoekstra 1995). This results in the possibility of using null be with these types of predicates. However, Nominal predicates, like the Noun Phrase in (2), are not aspectual and, therefore, copula be must be explicit to ensure temporal anchoring.
As for copula be with adjective predicates as in (3) and (4), these predicates could be considered Locative or Nominal (Stage-Level or Individual-Level, following Carlson 1977 and Schmitt and Miller’s 2007 terminology) depending on the type of adjective and on the context, so that (3) would contain a Locative/Stage-Level predicate, while (4) a Nominal/Individual-Level one. In this case, even though the results were less clear-cut and individual differences occurred both quantitatively and qualitatively, the stage-level predicate (3) versus the individual-level predicate (4) dichotomy parallels the Locative/Nominal one.

(3) I __ hungry (Leo, 2;11)
(4) Elmo is blue (Simon, 2;05)

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the copula in the developing English grammar of two English/Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the following issues: 1) whether a grammar-based or a processing-based approach best accounts for child omissions; 2) whether our data mirror the ones discussed by Becker with respect to the differences between Locative and Stage-level predicates versus Nominal and Individual level predicates; 3) whether the differences and similarities are shaped by the fact that Spanish copula is realized by two lexical items: estar (for cases like those in (1) and (3) above) and ser (for cases like those in (2) and (4) above); in other words, whether interlinguistic influence (Hulk and Müller 2000; Paradis and Navarro 2003) can be found in this specific area of grammar.

We have analyzed longitudinal data from the two bilingual children which cover the same age and MLU counts as in the four children in Becker’s (2004) study. An analysis of our data shows that: (i) a grammatical account is favoured over a processing one when the length of the utterances is measured as a word count; (ii) even though there are some similarities in the overall omission patterns with respect to the Locative/Nominal predicate dichotomy, the results are never significant. In the case of the Stage/Individual-level predicates, our data are even less transparent than the monolingual data: in fact our two children display opposite patterns of omission; and (iii) the lexical transparency of Spanish copula estar seems to play a role in the need to incorporate the inflectional level and, therefore, in the copula omission pattern, since our children’s rate of omission is significantly lower than the rate of omission displayed by Becker’s monolingual children.