Old Grammars New (?) Scope: Adjective Placement in Native and Non-Native Spanish

Erin Pettibone,Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux,Gabrielle Klassen

doi:10.3390/languages6010022

Abstract

Prior studies have examined the association between modifying adjective placement and interpretation in second language (L2) Spanish. These studies show evidence of convergence with native speaker’s intuitions, which is interpreted as restructuring of the underlying grammar. Two issues deserve further study: (i) there are debates on the nature of native speaker’s interpretations; (ii) previous results could be explained by a combination of explicit instruction and access to the first language (L1). The present study re-examines native and non-native intuitions on the interpretation of variable order adjectives in pre-nominal and post-nominal positions, and extends the domain of inquiry by asking if L2 learners have intuitions about the order of two-adjective sequences, which appear in mirror image order in English and Spanish (faded blue pants vs. pantalones azules desteñidos). Two-adjective sequences are rare in the input, not typically taught explicitly, and have a different word order that cannot be [partially] derived from the L1 subgrammar. Two groups of non-native speakers (n = 50) and native speaker controls (n = 15) participated in the study. Participants completed a preference task, testing the interaction between word order and restrictive/non-restrictive interpretation, and an acceptability judgement task, testing ordering intuitions for two-adjective sequences. Results of the preference task show that the majority of speakers, both native and non-native, prefer variable adjectives in a post-nominal position independent of interpretation. Results of the acceptability judgement task indicate that both native and non-native speakers prefer mirror image order. We conclude that these results support underlying grammar reanalysis in L2 speakers and indicate that the semantic distribution of variable adjectives is not fully complementary; rather, the post-nominal position is unmarked, and generally preferred by both native and non-native speakers.

Highlights

IntroductionTo what extent are native and non-native grammars alike?
To what extent are native and non-native grammars alike? Non-native learners face similar learning tasks as children: the problem of distributional learning of syntactic categories and the semantic mapping problem
Do adult non-native Spanish speakers restructure the determiner phrase (DP) to reflect the target grammar? We argued that previous studies overestimated complementarity in native speakers, and likewise, in learners

Summary

Introduction

To what extent are native and non-native grammars alike? Non-native learners face similar learning tasks as children: the problem of distributional learning of syntactic categories (where to place the forms) and the semantic mapping problem (what the configurations and forms mean). Adult learners must address these problems with reduced exposure, possibly past the age where their ability to make linguistic generalizations is optimal (Hudson Kam and Newport 2005; Schuler et al 2013), while constantly referencing entrenched L1 representations. Some authors argue that adult learners sometimes fail to fully acquire novel underlying structures. Earlier work suggests that second language (L2) speakers are limited to surface level learning. An absence of structural dependency is reported in the L2 literature on complex questions and relative clauses (Cook 2006) and scrambling (Hopp 2005).

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion