The distribution of subjects in L2 Spanish and L2 Greek

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to study the distribution of subjects in L2 Spanish and L2 Greek, given the fact that Greek and Spanish share the property of being null subject languages. For this reason, they represent an interesting context for comparison with respect to the Interface Hypothesis, one of the most influential hypotheses on second language acquisition. In particular, I test the validity of two versions of this hypothesis, the IH-1, which locates the complexity of acquisition at the interface levels (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006), and the IH-2, which postulates an easier acquisition of the internal interfaces as compared to the external interfaces (Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006). To this end, I designed a total of eight experiments, including acceptability judgment tasks, word order selection tasks and multiple choice tasks. The empirical domains tested were the production of null and overt subjects, and the distribution of subjects with different verbs classes (unergative, unaccusative, transitive) and different discourse contexts (broad focus, narrow focus, reference maintenance, reference shift, (non)-contrastive, adverbial). They were administered to L2 intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Spanish and Greek. The results obtained indicate that the L2 learners were able to produce the felicitous type of subjects in the appropriate contexts, but they did not always avoid infelicitous structures, such as the unergative/unaccusative distinction in informational contexts in L2 Spanish, and the position of the subjects of unaccusatives in L2 Greek. Competence level seemed to play a role in some pragmatic contexts, but not always; the type of task also had an impact on the results. More critically, the analysis of the results indicated that the performance of the L2 learners did not fulfil the IH-1 and the IH-2, as they did not always show difficulties with the acquisition of the syntactic-pragmatic properties of subjects, and at the same time they did not distinguish the syntactic-semantic properties of all verb classes. Thus, the results confirmed that not all internal or external interface properties were equally easy or difficult to acquire in L2, as found by Montrul (2011) and White (2011) for other language combinations. Against Rothman (2009), it was also found that neither version of the IH accounted for the performance of the less advanced learners. Overall, the involvement of pragmatics was not decisive for the acquisition of a second language, at least for the combination Greek-Spanish.

Date of Award	24 Nov 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Supervisor	Anna Gavarró Algueró (Director)