Acceptability of the English Resultative and Depictive Construction by Spanish native speakers learning EFL

PARÍS, LUIS; TABULLO, ÁNGEL; CELI, MARÍA ALEJANDRA

California

Conferencia; 2020 Western Conference on Linguistics; 2020

California State University, Fresno

Acceptability of the English Resultative and Depictive Construction by Spanishnative speakers learning EFLThe major typological contrast between English and Spanish lies on the design of thesimple Event (Talmy 2000), which has a significant impact on the acquisition of Englishby Spanish native speakers. While English main verbs tend to codify manner, theirSpanish correlates tend to codify result. If result needs to be codified, English resorts tothe Resultative Construction (ERC), a complex predicate structure in which the main verbcodifies manner and a phrase (either a Prepositional Phrase or an Adjectival Phrase)codifies result as in (1)(1) She hammered the metal flat.Spanish do not have an ERC equivalent although it does have a structure that is onlyformally similar, namely, the Depictive Construction (SDC) as illustrated in (2), which isalso present in English (DC), as shown in (3). DC lacks the result meaning of the ERC,yet their syntactic structure is alike.(2) Él devolvió el libro dañado´He returned the book damaged´(3) John came home exhausted.We have two objectives in this research devoted to describe the acquisition of English asa foreign language (EFL) by Spanish native speakers. First, we aim at exploring if DC isacquired at an earlier stage than ERC. Second, we want to specify if the different subtypesof ERC are acquired in a sequence driven by their departure from the Spanish pattern. Inorder to address these objectives, we conducted an experiment in an online questionnaireformat of an Acceptability Judgement Task (AJT) with a 1-7 Likert Scale. The taskincluded DC sentences together with two subtypes of ERC: Property ERC (syntacticallysimilar to DC) and Fake Reflexive ERC (syntactically different from DC). Half of thesentences were presented in their acceptable form and the other half displayed semanticanomalies. Subjects reported their proficiency level in English and an additionalVocabulary LexTALE questionnaire was applied.We ran a series of linear mixed-effects regression models on correct and incorrect itemsseparately. Both models turned out significant (χ2(2)?s > 8.340, p?s < 0.015). Post hocanalysis showed higher acceptability ratings for DC sentences compared to both Propertyand Fake Reflexive ERC (T?s > 4.578, p?s < 0.001) in all proficiency levels. In addition,acceptability increased with proficiency for Property and Fake Reflexive (t?s < -2.604,p?s < 0.027) ERC, but not for DC. Also, acceptability of incorrect DC and Property ERCdecreased with proficiency (T?s > 2.398, p?s < 0.047, while incorrect Fake Reflexivesremained unaffected. Taken together, self-reported proficiency and LexTALE vocabularyproficiency analysis of acceptability seem to indicate that: 1) DC are more easily acceptedby Spanish speakers, which may be due to transfer effects from L1 to L2; 2) theacceptability of ERC improves with proficiency (DC> Property ERC >Fake ReflexiveERC); 3) error discrimination improves with proficiency for all structures except for FakeReflexives, which may indicate a greater processing difficulty due to its syntacticcomplexity for Spanish speakers.ReferencesTalmy, L. (2000) Toward Cognitive Semantics, Volume 1: Concept Structuring Systems.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 565 pp