Medial wh-questions in native and non-native spanish: learnability and methodological issues.

Medial wh-questions in native and non-native spanish: learnability and methodological issues
J. M. Liceras, A. Alba, L. Walsh and P. López-Morelos
University of Ottawa

Using Chomsky’s view of language acquisition and the Minimalist Program, this research seeks to provide a psycholinguistic account of the non-native (L2) acquisition of wh-medial constructions (What do you think who the students like?; Who do you think who the students like?) in the grammars of French and English speakers learning German and Spanish as foreign languages. The presence of these constructions has been attested in the L1 grammars of children acquiring languages where they are not an option in the adult grammar (Thorton 1990; Oiry & Demirdache 2006), as well as in L2 grammars where neither the native nor the target grammar exhibits them (Gutierrez 2005; Schulz 2006; Slavkov 2008). This poses a learnability problem for the researcher, who must determine what type of evidence triggers the production and acceptance of these constructions. There have been competence explanations (i.e. they constitute a default or possible option which is innately available) or processing explanations (i.e. the English grammatical equivalents pose problems either for the parser in general or for working memory in particular). It has also been argued that evidence for these constructions could be provided by abstract morpho-syntactic features or related constructions via transfer from the L2. However, there is no clear-cut evidence favoring one explanation over another, and comparable experimental data gathered from different non-native grammars is not available.

The primary significance of the proposed research resides in addressing the learnability issue of whether universal availability of computational mechanisms, direct input or processing needs constitute the best account for the presence of wh-medial constructions (WH-MQ) in L2 grammars whose learners’ L1s do not exhibit them. To investigate the production, acceptance and processing cost of these instances of long distance dependencies we will use a grammaticality judgments task, an oral production task and an online event-related brain potential (ERP) processing task. In order to address the issue of universal availability versus direct input and processing cost we will compare: (a) the status of WH-MQs, which are possible in German but not in Spanish, to the status of long-distance wh-questions (Who do you think the students like?) which are the preferred or primary option in many natural languages. If direct input plays a role, we should find a clear-cut difference between L2 German and L2 Spanish. However, if the status of these constructions is similar in the two non-native grammars, universal availability or processing costs will have to be called upon.

Here we report on the preliminary results of the grammaticality judgments task that has been administered to a group of French and English learners of Spanish and to a group of native Spanish speakers.

European Portuguese (EP) versus Brazilian Portuguese (BP): its challenges in L2 Portuguese undergraduate courses

European Portuguese (EP) versus Brazilian Portuguese (BP): its challenges in L2 Portuguese undergraduate courses

Sonia Maria Nunes Reis, The University of Western Ontario

Issues such as the teaching of clitic placement in Portuguese and the challenges associated with dialect variations leaves room for much discussion in curriculum design and curriculum delivery in post-secondary institutions. Portuguese has the status of being an official language in various countries, but European and Brazilian Portuguese stand as the two varieties most often discussed in experimental literature. Despite the similarities between EP and BP, their syntactic and phonological differences are more extreme than in some other cases of variation, such as the variation found in Spanish, an issue that gives rise to the present study. We are particularly interested in clitic placement from an L2 Acquisition standpoint, and more specifically in the challenges faced in L2 Portuguese courses at the university level. That is, issues pertaining but not limited to:

What attitudes are found amongst L2 Portuguese instructors and L2 Portuguese learners with respect to the two variables of the Portuguese language and the existence of two Portuguese dialects?

Is there a connection between these attitudes of the instructors versus the attitudes of the students in question?

Are the students confused with respect to pronouns in Portuguese?

According to Kato and Raposo (1994), the distinction between EP and BP is dialectal: “European and Brazilian Portuguese have long been considered as two dialects of the same language, with variable aspects in their lexicon, phonology, and grammar.” Along these lines, we are herein interested in studying the phenomenon of dialectal applications of clitic placement in the both variants of the Portuguese language. Examples of dialectal variations between EP and BP are as follow (1) (2):

(1)

a. Chamo-me Sónia. (EP)
b. Me chamo Sônia. (BP)

(2)

a. Eu vi-o no ano passado. (EP- written and spoken)
b. Eu vi ele no ano passado. (BP- spoken)
c. Eu o vi no ano passado. (BP- written)

A questionnaire was given to instructors and students of L2 Portuguese at a Canadian university in order to find out how problematic this issue was and how it was generally approached in different institutions. A grammaticality judgment task was also administered to both groups to see which dialect of the Portuguese language (EP or BP) would be preferred in regards to clitic placement. This grammaticality judgment task differed in that its objective was to ascertain which of the two dialects had been internalized by the learners, or if in fact learners accepted both. In the case of the instructors, the grammaticality judgment task also asked, in those forms that were rejected, why they were rejected, whether it was because it simply did not sound grammatical, or whether it was because the rejected form was seen as substandard or uneducated. The results will be discussed.

Instant Messenger conversations in Spanish

Instant Messenger conversations in Spanish

Yolanda Pangtay-Chang

More and more people around the world communicate with others through the use of Internet (Crystal, 2001). Messages on Instant Messenger are written and sent to everybody participating in the communication. When we read and reply to those messages it seems we are having a conversation. Do these messages have written or oral characteristics? Writing and speech, each have different conventions. Writing conventions have to do with punctuation, capitalization, grammar, spelling, and organization of ideas. On the other hand, oral characteristics such as tone, intonation, silence, interjections, pauses, laughter, gestures, and facial expressions contribute to the interpretation of what is said.

The following Instant Messenger conversation shows punctuation marks, capitalization of some words, good spelling, and the use of standard Mexican grammar. We can also notice interjections, pauses, short answers, in other words an attempt is made to convey oral conversational features.

(1) A: ¿Qué tal tu día?
‘How’s your day?’
B: cansadón
‘tiring’
B: y el tuyo?
‘yours?’

A: Huy
‘oh’
B: mmmmh
‘mmmmm’

A: y eso que significa . . . bueno o malo?
‘what does that mean. . . good or bad?’
B: Bueno
‘Good’

With some exceptions (see Johnson 2007), there are almost no studies on the characteristic features of Instant Messenger speech, particularly in languages such as Spanish. The present paper will examine these features based on a corpus of MSN Instant Messenger.

The study focused on the use of connectors such as porque ‘because’, es por eso ‘therefore’, así ‘so’, y ‘and’, etc., as well as other discourse markers such as punctuation, entonation, gestures and/or representations of expressions such as laughter. Discourse markers help senders and receivers of a conversation to perceive the meaning or intention of the communication.

Twenty-five subjects participated in the research, all of them part of the researcher’s contact list on MSN messenger. All the participants are speakers of L1 Spanish, which they use to communicate with the researcher and with their family and friends in their own contact list.

Their ages range from 20 to 66 years old. The objective of this study was to observe grammatical and pragmatic phenomena and forms and functions of the language in the conversations. The researcher kept her MSN open, in order to be either contacted or to contact subjects. 273 conversations were analyzed, looking for: opening and closing, adjacent pairs, turn-taking, change of topics, use of irony or sarcasm, among other features in a conversation.

Results show how participants in an IM conversation follow oral strategies to understand their messages. The time of replication is done in seconds from one message to another. Certain words and expressions in the acts of speech seem to function as replacement of intonation and even facial expressions. In addition, whenever a message was not understood, users would ask for clarification or repair the misunderstanding..

Double negatives: morphology in contact

Double negatives: morphology in contact

Prof. Maria Cristina Cuervo
Natalia Mazzaro

Sentential negation with preverbal n-words displays a crosslinguistic contrast in the presence/absence of a negative element, as illustrated with Spanish (1) and French (2) below. Analyses of this contrast account for this variation in terms of some kind of syntactic parametric variation –in strength of features, movement, etc.– (see Bosque, 1994; Laka, 1994; Haegeman, 1995; Zannuttini, 1997; among others).

1) Nadie (*no) abrió la puerta
Nobody NEG opened the door
'Nobody opened the door'.

2) Personne *( n)’a ouvert la porte
Nobody NEG has opened the door
'Nobody opened the door'.

This contrast is not only found across languages but also within dialects of one language (see Franco & Landa 2006 for Basque Spanish, for instance). In Corrientes – Argentine - Spanish (CS), a variety in contact with Guaraní, the negative clitic no can appear with a preverbal n-word, as shown in (3). Interestingly, the Standard Spanish (SS) variant without no is also accepted (4):

3) Nunca no nos pasó nada (D:164)
Never NEG us happened nothing
'Nothing ever happened to us.'

4) Nunca nos controlaron (D:237)
Never us check
‘They never checked on us’

We present new data which show that this variation exists not only within the same variety of Spanish, but within the same speaker as well. We propose a morphological account of the phenomenon which draws a parallelism between variation in the cooccurrence of a preverbal n-word and the negative clitic –to which we refer as negative doubling- and variation in direct object clitic doubling. Previous approaches seem ill suited to account for variation within the same speaker, since they would suggest speakers have two distinct grammars.
In order to determine the prevalence of negative doubling in the speech community, we conducted and analysed 12 sociolinguistic interviews, each an hour and a half long. The 12 native speakers of CS are distributed along the social categories of sex, age, social class and literacy. The analysis yielded a total of 134 tokens of standard preverbal negation and negative doubling. The results show that negative doubling has an overall rate of occurrence of 17% and that it is present in all layers of society, with women leading in the rate of its use (68%). Concerning the linguistic factors tested, analysis of specificity of the n-word indicates that while the standard variant can have either a specific (44%) or non-specific (56%) reference, negative doubling constructions are almost categorically specific (88%). Specificity, however, was difficult to test with tampoco ‘neither’ and ni ‘nor’.
Negative doubling emerges as the lack of complementarity in distribution of agreeing no and a preverbal n-word, just as clitic doubling is lack of complementarity between an argument DP and an agreeing clitic. We propose, in the spirit of Watanabe 2001, that no is the negative clitic which spells out the Neg head as default, that is, when the specifications of no other lexical items are met. In SS, the item ø rather than no is inserted when SpecNeg is filled. Under this view, the variation found in CS is not a difference in structure or feature strength, which would imply subject-internal variation in core syntax. Here the variation is reduced to variation on the specification of the lexical items ø and no, and is localized in the lexicon (Adger & Smith, 2002). Although of similar nature, this approach crucially differs from Franco & Landa’s (2006) in that it does not depend on their claim –proven wrong by data such as in (1)– that preverbal n-words are contrastively focused and receive main stress. This account can also capture the fact that negative doubling not only occurs with argumental n-words but with negative adverb tampoco ‘neither’ and conjunction ni ‘nor’.

La presencia docente en contextos online asincrónicos (escritos y orales) en el aprendizaje del español como segunda lengua.

Ana García-Allén

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo la creación y el análisis de una actividad de enseñanza-aprendizaje prevista en el diseño de un curso universitario de Español Lengua Extranjera (ELE). Para ello nos centraremos en tres ejes teóricos principalmente: por un lado la enseñanza-aprendizaje de Segundas Lenguas (L2) en entornos virtuales, más concretamente en la enseñanza-aprendizaje del Español como Lengua Extranjera en contextos online asincrónicos; por otro lado en los contextos on-line asincrónicos tanto orales como escritos y por último en la presencia docente en contextos online asincrónicos.

El objetivo principal de este proyecto de investigación es valorar por un lado, el uso de una determinada estructura gramatical en la expresión oral y escrita de los estudiantes y por otro la incidencia de la presencia docente en la adquisición y mejora de dichas estructuras .

Los resultados aportarán evidencias empíricas que proporcionan una mayor comprensión de la incidencia de la presencia docente en el aprendizaje de ELE en contextos online asincrónicos orales y escritos.

The acquisition of gender in the L2 Spanish of L1 Polish speakers

Ewelina Barski

This research investigates the acquisition of the abstract feature [gender] in second language (L2) Spanish. Previous research on the acquisition of gender found that gender was difficult to acquire resulting in persistent problems in agreement (Franceschina 2001; Hawkins 1998). Problems realizing gender have been attributed to ‘mapping’ problems where there is a mismatch between surface realizations and abstract feature properties (White et al. 2004). Spanish is a language that has a gender feature for nouns and gender agreement for determiners and adjectives a property of the grammar for which explicit instruction is received. However, viewing how L1 Polish speakers acquire gender in their L2 Spanish will be interesting since Polish also marks gender in demonstratives, nouns and adjectives. In order to investigate this issue, all Polish and Spanish speaking participants completed two tests: An oral production task and a picture-matching task. Currently, there are 14 L1 Polish speakers and 9 L1 Spanish speakers who have been tested. Preliminary results indicate that problems realizing gender are present even when the L1 also marks grammatical gender.