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.