Abstract
This study explores syntactic, pragmatic, and lexical influences on adherence to SV and VS orders in native and fluent L2 speakers of Spanish. A judgment task examined 20 native monolingual and 20 longstanding L2 bilingual Spanish speakers' acceptance of SV and VS structures. Seventy-six distinct verbs were tested under a combination of syntactic and pragmatic constraints. Our findings challenge the hypothesis that internal interfaces are acquired more easily than external interfaces (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; White, 2006). Additional findings are that (a) bilinguals' judgments are less firm overall than monolinguals' (i.e., monolinguals are more likely to give extreme “yes” or “no” judgments) and (b) individual verbs do not necessarily behave as predicted under standard definitions of unaccusatives and unergatives. Correlations of the patterns found in the data with verb frequencies suggest that usage-based accounts of grammatical knowledge could help provide insight into speakers' knowledge of these constructs.
Highlights
This article concerns the extent to which high-functioning L2 Spanish speakers have acquired the full grammar for the expression of focus
This study provides an empirical test for the interface hypothesis, which posits that internal interfaces are not problematic for L2 acquisition while external interfaces are problematic, acquired later, or never acquired
An Five-Way mixed repeated measures ANOVA was conducted in which verb type, word order (SV, VS), prototypicality (3 levels), information structure, and participant group were entered as variables
Summary
This article concerns the extent to which high-functioning L2 Spanish speakers have acquired the full grammar for the expression of focus. We look at the language-specific means of expressing linguistic focus within the bilingual’s two grammars, Spanish and English. Linguistic focus concerns that portion of a sentence that contributes the most relevant new information, the non-presupposed information, of the utterance. Focus stands at the interface between syntax, phonology, and pragmatics, as what is focused in a sentence, expressed syntactically and/or phonologically, depends directly on the discourse and pragmatic intent in which the sentence is embedded. We will examine the expression of focus in Spanish through the syntactic operations of word order. We test both Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-English functional bilinguals
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