Spanish Applied Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium

Abstract

Spanish Applied Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium. By Ed. Ronald P. Leow and Cristina Sanz. Somerville: Cascadilla, 2000. 234 pages.Spanish Applied Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium is a collection of papers culled from the 1999 Conference on L1 and L2 Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese. The volume is divided into five sections: morpho-syntax, reading, bilingualism, phonology, and writing. While the choice of these section headings certainly reflects the eclectic nature of Spanish Applied Linguistics, the volume lacks a strong sense of organization and cohesion. Indeed, the editors make only vague illusions to the threads which hold this collection together, emphasizing breadth over depth, and Minimalism over other strands of inquiry in Second Language Acquisition.The section on morphosyntax offers six papers which examine the acquisition of Spanish as either a first or an additional language. Studies by Camps, Collentine, and Geeslin each address issues of interlanguage development among learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Camps, for example, investigates how the introduction of the imperfect tense might influence the ability of novice learners to produce the forms of the preterit tense accurately in written texts and to use these forms correctly in meaningful written contexts. Collentine compares the abilities of advanced adult learners of Spanish to process verbal morphology and sentence-level syntax. Finally, Geeslin draws on insights from both sociolinguistic and semantic-pragmatic studies of copula choice to examine the acquisition of two constructions (ser + adjective and estar + adjective) by seventy-two learners of high-school age with different levels of expertise in Spanish.Three additional papers in this section take a Minimalist approach to the acquisition of Spanish. In a study of the verb forms produced by four Spanish-speaking monolingual children (16-31 months old), Duran argues that even incipient L1 users show an awareness of functional linguistic categories like person and tense. Liceras, Diaz, and Mongeon compare and contrast the acquisition of null noun constructions and the determiner paradigm by adult L1 and child L2 learners of Spanish. The third article in this section addresses the acquisition of the argument structure of Spanish psychological verbs by learners from different linguistic backgrounds. Here, Montrul asks whether the interlanguage grammars of learners from different linguistic backgrounds (L1 = Turkish, L1 = English) are constrained by UG with respect to the acquisition of verbs like asustar, which subcategorize for two thematic roles: an experiencer and a theme. …