Effects of Adjective Type on Position and Interpretation in Native Polish Classroom Learners of Spanish

Tiffany Judy

doi:10.3390/languages6030153

Abstract

This study examines the effect of adjective type on distribution and interpretation of Spanish adjectives in native Polish classroom learners of Spanish. A native Spanish group (n = 16), an advanced Spanish learner group (n = 24), and an intermediate Spanish learner group (n = 25) completed one task examining knowledge of the syntactic distribution of intensional and classifying adjectives and two tasks examining interpretive knowledge of the syntax–semantic distribution of qualifying adjectives in Spanish. While native-like convergence largely obtained for the interpretive tasks, statistically significant differences obtained between native and learner groups on the syntactic task, perhaps a by-product of overgeneralization of the postnominal position resulting from explicit instruction. The main import of this study is that examination of an understudied and typologically–distinct language pairing allows for syntactic and syntax–semantic microvariations to inform the L2 learners’ outcomes on the tasks.

Highlights

Functionalist and formal approaches have contributed to our understanding of adjectives in Spanish, with the former focusing more on distribution and the latter on interpretation
Due to the similarity across Polish and Spanish, is the learner groups’ performance on intensional adjectives in the Grammaticality Judgment with Correction Task (GJCT). Recall that both learner groups rejected grammatical prenominal intensional adjectives and accepted ungrammatical postnominal intensional adjectives, a result that primarily points to learners overgeneralizing the postnominal position in Spanish, and perhaps secondarily, to lack of familiarity with these particular adjectives, which are fewer in number and less frequent
Support for the claim that the learners assume Spanish adjectives appear postnominally is bolstered when we return to the fact that the only grammatical position for intensional adjectives is prenominal in both languages, meaning that L1 transfer and L2 ambiguity alike can be ruled out as influencing factors

Summary

Introduction

Functionalist and formal approaches have contributed to our understanding of adjectives in Spanish, with the former focusing more on distribution and the latter on interpretation. 2012), and that the relative syllabic weight of the adjective (File-Muriel 2006), style of speech (Hoff 2014), and lexical frequency (Kanwit and Terán 2020) influence placement of alternating adjectives in native Spanish, which constitutes some of the input L2 learners receive. Generative interest in microvariation (Baker 2008; Kayne 2005) has surfaced more frequently in recent formal acquisition studies, and for fruitful reasons. The field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is steadily moving from larger-scale questions (e.g., new feature acquisition in postpubescent learners) to narrower questions affecting language acquisition. Including language pairings that vary in micro, as opposed to macro, ways facilitates this goal, and necessarily requires the examination of a wide array of language combinations

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion