Expressing uncontrolledness in narratives of accidental events: A comparison between native and non-native speakers of Spanish

Abstract

This paper compares the range of alternating constructions to convey the notion of uncontrolledness in narratives of accidental events told by native and non-native speakers of Spanish. The paper addresses the question of whether or not these speaker groups convey an accidental event differently. Using a meaning-focused production task, natural-like oral narratives of accidental events were elicited from a group of 45 English-speaking learners of Spanish at advanced instructional levels and 45 Colombian monolingual Spanish speakers. Constructions conveying uncontrolled events in finite clauses across the whole stories were contrasted. Special attention was paid to constructions with se conveying accidentality in which syntactic features such as agreement, word order, and null subjects were analyzed. The results of the study show that native Spanish speakers use significantly more constructions with se conveying accidentality than non-native speakers, especially in the story climax. A form-focused acceptability judgment task was carried out to address metalinguistic knowledge and compare its results with those from the production task, which arguably reflects a greater use of procedural-communicative knowledge. The paper gives evidence of a different performance of native and non-native speakers of Spanish in production and acceptability tasks.