Acceptability of the English Resultative and Depictive Construction by Spanish Native Speakers Learning EFL

CELI, MARIA ALEJANDRA; TABULLO, ANGEL; PARÍS, LUIS

California

Conferencia; 2020 Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL); 2020

California State University, Fresno, EEUU

The major typological contrast between English and Spanish lies on the design of the simple Event (Talmy 2000), which has a significant impact on the acquisition of English by Spanish native speakers. While English main verbs tend to codify manner, their Spanish correlates tend to codify result. If result needs to be codified, English resorts to the Resultative Construction (ERC), a complex predicate structure in which the main verb codifies manner and a phrase (either a Prepositional Phrase or an Adjectival Phrase) codifies result She hammered the metal flat. Spanish do not have an ERC equivalent although it does have a structure that is only formally similar, namely, the Depictive Construction (SDC) as illustrated in Él devolvió el libro dañado, which is also present in English (DC), as shown in John came home exhausted. DC lacks the result meaning of the ERC, yet their syntactic structure is alike.We have two objectives in this research devoted to describe the acquisition of English as a foreign language (EFL) by Spanish native speakers. First, we aim at exploring if DC is acquired at an earlier stage than ERC. Second, we want to specify if the different subtypes of ERC are acquired in a sequence driven by their departure from the Spanish pattern. In order to address these objectives, we conducted an experiment in an online questionnaire format of an Acceptability Judgement Task (AJT) with a 1-7 Likert Scale. The task included DC sentences together with two subtypes 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. Subjects reported their proficiency level in English and an additional Vocabulary LexTALE questionnaire was applied.We ran a series of linear mixed-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 DC sentences compared to both Property and 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 ERC decreased with proficiency (T’s > 2.398, p’s < 0.047, while incorrect Fake Reflexives remained unaffected. Taken together, self-reported proficiency and LexTALE vocabulary proficiency analysis of acceptability seem to indicate that: 1) DC are more easily accepted by Spanish speakers, which may be due to transfer effects from L1 to L2; 2) the acceptability of ERC improves with proficiency (DC> Property ERC >Fake Reflexive ERC); 3) error discrimination improves with proficiency for all structures except for Fake Reflexives, which may indicate a greater processing difficulty due to its syntactic complexity for Spanish speakers.LINK PARA ACCEDER A LA PRESENTACIÓN: https://view.genial.ly/5faeae1ea67bfb0d330db561/presentation-wecol