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In:Null Objects from a Cross-Linguistic and Developmental Perspective
Edited by Pilar Barbosa and Cristina Flores
[Language Faculty and Beyond 19] 2025
► pp. 171–204

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On the acquisition of residual object drop in L2 Spanish by European Portuguese native speakers

 | Universitat de les Illes Balears
 | Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Published online: 15 April 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.19.07gui
Abstract
This paper investigates European Portuguese-speaking advanced learners of Spanish and assesses their knowledge of (un)interpretable features that have been argued to constrain the possibility of direct object drop in Spanish, discussing the predictions of two different hypotheses — the Interpretability Hypothesis (IH) (e.g., Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007) and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (e.g., Lardiere, 2008, 2009). Adopting the same methodology as Bruhn de Garavito & Guijarro-Fuentes (2002), we present empirical data from two exploratory tasks examining the relevant semantic and syntactic constraints on object drop in L2 Spanish. The results indicate that learners have knowledge of the syntactic properties of null objects, but have not yet developed the semantic restrictions, which is expected under the FRH, but not under the IH. These results evidence a problem of L1 preemption, i.e., learners have difficulty in overcoming L1 transfer, which may be due to the typological similarity between EP and Spanish and to the lack of sufficient evidence in the input.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Object drop
    • 2.1Spanish
    • 2.2European Portuguese
    • 2.3L2 learning task
  • 3.Background assumptions
    • 3.1Theoretical hypotheses on the acquirability of grammatical features
    • 3.2The role of the L1
  • 4.Previous studies on object drop in L2 Spanish
  • 5.Research questions
  • 6.Methodology
    • 6.1Participants
    • 6.2Tasks and procedures
      • 6.2.1The elicited production task
      • 6.2.2The grammaticality judgement task
  • 7.Data analysis
    • 7.1The elicited production task
    • 7.2The grammaticality judgement task
  • 8.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (59)
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