INCIHUSA   20883
INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS HUMANAS, SOCIALES Y AMBIENTALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Proceeding "Acceptability of the English Resultative and Depictive Construction by Spanish Native Speakers Learning EFL"
Autor/es:
TABULLO, ANGEL; CELI, MARIA ALEJANDRA; PARÍS, LUIS
Lugar:
Fresno, California
Reunión:
Conferencia; 2020 Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL); 2020
Institución organizadora:
California State University, Fresno, EEUU
Resumen:
The majortypological contrast between English and Spanish lies on the design of thesimple Event (Talmy 2000), which has a significant impact on the acquisition ofEnglish by Spanish native speakers. While English main verbs tend to codify manner, their Spanish correlatestend to codify result. If result needsto be codified, English resorts to the Resultative Construction (ERC), a complexpredicate structure in which the main verb codifies manner and a phrase (eithera Prepositional Phrase or an Adjectival Phrase) codifies result as in(1)(1)       She hammered the metal flat.  Spanish donot have an ERC equivalent although it does have a structure that is onlyformally similar, namely, the Depictive Construction (SDC) as illustrated in (2),which is also present in English (DC), as shown in (3). DC lacks the resultmeaning of the ERC, yet their syntactic structure is alike.(2)       Él devolvió el libro dañado            ´He returned the book damaged´  (3)       John came homeexhausted.  We have two objectives in this research devotedto describe the acquisition of English as a foreign language (EFL) by Spanishnative speakers. First, we aim at exploring if DC is acquired at an earlierstage than ERC. Second, we want to specify if the different subtypes of ERC areacquired in a sequence driven by their departure from the Spanish pattern. Inorder to address these objectives, we conducted anexperiment in an online questionnaire format of an Acceptability Judgement Task(AJT) with a 1-7 Likert Scale. The task included DC sentences together with twosubtypes of ERC: Property ERC (syntactically similar to DC) and Fake Reflexive ERC(syntactically different from DC). Half of the sentences were presented in their acceptable form and the other half displayed  semantic anomalies. Subjectsreported their proficiency level in English and an additional Vocabulary LexTALE questionnaire was applied. We ran a series of linearmixed-effects regression models on correct and incorrect items separately. Both models turned out significant (χ2 (2)?s > 8.340,p?s < 0.015). Post hoc analysis showed higher acceptability ratings for DCsentences compared to both Property and Fake Reflexive ERC (T?s > 4.578, p?s< 0.001) in all proficiency levels. In addition, acceptability increasedwith proficiency for Property and Fake Reflexive (t?s < -2.604, p?s <0.027) ERC, but not for DC. Also, acceptability of incorrect DC andProperty ERC decreased with proficiency (T?s> 2.398, p?s < 0.047, while incorrect Fake Reflexives remainedunaffected. Taken together, self-reportedproficiency and LexTALE vocabulary proficiency analysis of acceptability seemto indicate that: 1) DC are more easily accepted by Spanish speakers, which maybe due to transfer effects from L1 to L2; 2) the acceptability of ERC improveswith proficiency (DC>Property ERC >Fake Reflexive ERC); 3) errordiscrimination improves with proficiency for all structures except for Fake Reflexives,which may indicate a greater processing difficulty due to its syntactic complexityfor Spanish speakers.