Feature reassembly across closely related languages: L1 French vs. L1 Portuguese learning of L2 Spanish Past Tenses

ABSTRACT

Considering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR levels, of Spanish tense-aspect morphology: simple and compound past (SP, CP), imperfect (IMP), progressive (PROG), and pluperfect (PLP) forms, and from a control group of European Spanish speakers’ use and interpretation of these tenses. Data were collected through a film oral retell and two written interpretation tasks; the second written task (a follow-up task), was performed only by L1 French speakers. In the oral task, comparing both L1 backgrounds, negative transfer is more pervasive for the Portuguese groups. However, in the interpretation tasks, the French speakers showed greater difficulties, linked not only to L1 transfer but also to nonprototypical tense/aspect associations and pragmatically based temporal reference. The data suggest, in relation to Lardiere’s (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, that both feature reassembly and interface integration are sources of variability in the acquisition of L2 interpretable features that are also present in the L1.

Notes

¹ Therefore, the English PLP I had spoken corresponds with Spanish as había hablado, while it can be expressed in Portuguese as falara (in literary use) and as tinha falado (in everyday language); on the other hand, hablara is in present-day Spanish an imperfect subjunctive form. Spanish has also a second, less used imperfect subjunctive form in -se (hablase), closely resembling the morphology of the Portuguese imperfect subjunctive (falasse). See Moreno de Alba (2006) and Romani (2006) for details on the genesis and evolution of such verb forms.

² Even in imperfective contexts, the frequency of PROG is much lower in French than in the other two languages. This may be due to the fact that the French construction is an innovation dating only from the 18th century, and it may not have reached a stage of full grammaticalization (Bertinetto 2000).

³ Thus, in Spanish, the difference between the CP and the SP is related to tense (not to aspect), while in contemporary French it is mainly linked to the interplay of register (informal vs. formal, oral vs. written) and genre (nonliterary vs. literary).

⁴ The studies mentioned here are suggested as further reading, since they cannot be discussed in more detail herein due to space limitations.

⁵ The language courses offered at Instituto Cervantes centers around the world are primarily built on an extremely thorough, single, CEFR-based curriculum, which is subsequently adapted to different areas, following cross-linguistic and cross-cultural criteria. Students are required to pass a placement test before enrolling; exams based on the institutional curriculum are performed at the end of each course.

⁶ The ethnolinguistic data collected will not be reported herein due to space limitations. However, given the geolectal variation found in Spanish, it must be highlighted that all our participants had learned (and were learning) standard European Spanish; none of them declared having lived or studied Spanish in Latin American countries.

⁷ Tenses are reported following its frequency in the data; the word NO is included in some functions to account for the fact that, in some of the stories produced, such functions were not present at all.

⁸ Activities (but not telic predicates) inflected with PROG were already frequent at B1.

⁹ In the control group there is a noticeable degree of individual variation in the use of PRES (a mean of 13.88 forms, with a standard deviation of 12.1). Some native speakers used the PRES in specific parts of the story, but they did so in an articulate way, not as isolated instances.

¹⁰ However, incorrect use of auxiliary verb tener did not extend to the CP forms produced by the L1 Portuguese speakers; this is possibly related to input frequency.

¹¹ The items tested in this task, the expected native speaker answers for the items and the potential L2 learning difficulty of each item, are displayed in the appendix.

¹² As mentioned previously, Task 3 was developed at a time when the participants in the previous tasks were no longer available; therefore, none of the participants had taken part in the previous stages of the study. However, the tendencies shown in Task 2 were assumed to be generalizable to the L1 French learners of Spanish as a whole.

¹³ Due to space limitations the response time data will not be reported herein.

¹⁴ As described in section 4.2, interval adverbials connected to speech time allow both SP and CP use, depending on the type of event location the speaker chooses to represent (even though speakers of standard European Spanish tend to prefer CP); therefore, some variability was expected within the control group.

¹⁵ In quotative/echoic interpretations of the IMP, the tense is understood as reporting words or thoughts from someone who is not the speaker (or, alternatively, from the speaker at a time different from that of the main utterance).

¹⁶ In fact, interval adverbials connected to speech time allow both SP and CP use, depending on the type of event location the speaker chooses to represent: the interval as a whole (with the CP) or some inner point within that interval (with the SP). Unanimity was neither expected nor found within the control group, but native speakers (of European Spanish) clearly favored interval location (with the CP).