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Article published In: Copulas in Spanish and Beyond
Edited by Silvia Gumiel-Molina and Isabel Pérez-Jiménez
[Spanish in Context 20:2] 2023
► pp. 282–312

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Acquisition of estar + adjective in L2 Spanish by L1 French and Portuguese speakers

 | Universidad de las Islas Baleares
 | Universidad Complutense de Madrid
 | Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Published online: 7 July 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.00085.gui
Abstract
This paper reports the developmental stages of the acquisition of estar in stage-level predicate constructions in the L2 Spanish grammar of native speakers of French and Portuguese. Copular verbs exist in the L1s of both learner groups; however, only in Portuguese is there an aspectual contrast, with copula selection conditions that partially differ from those of ser and estar in Spanish. The study used data extracted from the Corpus de Aprendices de Español (CAES), made up of written texts produced by L2 Spanish learners from CEFR A1 to C1 levels. We attempt to analyse whether, and to what degree, these L2 learners are sensitive to estar copula restrictions in adjective constructions. Our analysis of the written production of 143 L1 French speakers and 361 L1 Portuguese speakers showed differing acquisitional patterns depending on the L1. We consider that the estar overextension, found in the learners’ productions, is related to the process of developing the ability to identify the specific features that distinguish the use of copular verbs in the interlanguage of our learners. Our findings, thus, provide a more fine-grained description of the semantic representation and access of interpretable features in L2 Spanish with special relevance to current hypotheses on Second Language Acquisition such as the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, Donna. 2009. “Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition.” Second Language Research 25 (2): 173–227. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Linguistic background: A Romance comparison
    • 2.1Spanish
    • 2.2Portuguese
    • 2.3French
  • 3.Adult L2 acquisition background
  • 4.Study design
    • 4.1Methodology
    • 4.2Results
      • 4.2.1Uses of estar at A1 level
      • 4.2.2Uses of estar at A2 level
      • 4.2.3Uses of estar at B1 level
      • 4.2.4Uses of estar at B2 level
      • 4.2.5Error analysis
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
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