The role of aspect in the acquisition of ser and estar in locative contexts by English-speaking learners of Spanish

ABSTRACT

This study proposes an explanatory account for the developmental stages of the acquisition of ser and estar in locative constructions. We propose that this copular distribution is regulated by two aspectual features, dynamicity and temporal boundedness. These features are crucial for the interpretation of nominals such as dinner, which refers to the physical food [–dynamic] with estar and to the event of having a meal [+dynamic] with ser. In a Picture Matching Task and an Elicited Production Task, English-speaking learners of Spanish had to comprehend, locate, and distinguish objects from events by employing the two Spanish copulas. We questioned whether L2 learners would be sensitive to the aspectual nature of subjects and copulas in locative constructions. We found that participants had difficulties interpreting the feature [+dynamic] in nominal subjects and propose that this is the last feature acquired, offering a revised developmental path of the acquisition of ser/estar.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants who completed this experiment, as well as the instructors and coordinator who helped us collect the data in their classes. Special thanks to Diana Botero for her involvement in the project. We kindly thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and insights that made us improve the manuscript. All errors or misinterpretations remain our own.

Notes

¹ Certain Colombian dialects still accept the location of places with ser (Alvar 1996).

² English also employs the copula for existential constructions, which only partially overlaps with Spanish. These constructions, which can also be considered part of a universal locative paradigm (Freeze 1992), will not be covered in this study.

³ Notice that in most other contexts (I-L states), ser is mapped onto a different bundle of features [–temporally bounded, –dynamic].

⁴ We find it in the location of events, eventive passives, and eventive adjectives, as explained at the end of section 3.

⁵ Natives tended to create sentences that do not necessarily used the copular verb to indicate location, such as Las palomitas del cine Avenida Corrientes están buenísimas/son muy caras ‘The popcorn from the Corrientes boulevard are_estar very good/are_ser very expensive,’ or used different verbs to indicate location, such as in La fiesta se celebra en la discoteca ‘The party takes place in the disco’ or La sopa se sirve en el restaurante de la avenida Jujuy ‘The soup is served in the restaurant of Jujuy Blv.’ These cases were not included in the overall calculation of ser/estar production in Table 1.

⁶ There was also one low-intermediate participant who never produced a copula, either with events or with objects. We believe s/he did not fully understand the purpose of the task and was removed from the overall calculation.

⁷ Item was also included as a random intercept but finally discarded by the fitness of the model.

⁸ Inaccurate responses are not explicitly reported here as these are, for the most part, the remaining proportions up to 1. This means that if there is a .38 of accuracy in choosing an object when a sentence with estar is presented, then, approximately 62% of the time, these participants inappropriately selected the image that depicted an event when presented with estar.