European Portuguese L2 clitics acquisition and the feature reassembly hypothesis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.4777Keywords:
Second language acquisition, Clitic pronouns, European Portuguese, Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH)Abstract
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) suggests that the difficulties in second language (L2) acquisition happen when the learners have to reassemble the features present in their native language in order to present the L2’s configuration. This study aimed to test the FRH regarding the acquisition of clitics pattern in European Portuguese (EP) L2 and the acceptability of verbal responses, following Martins (1994), who correlates both phenomena with EP’s strong V-features. Divided into two different proficiency groups, 21 native speakers of Spanish executed two tasks: one of sentences completion and an acceptability judgment task of verbal responses. Differently to what has happened in other studies, preference for enclisis was lower. The analysis by proclitic context showed that the development of the placement patterns is not homogeneous, with negative contexts being produced in higher rates even at lower levels of proficiency. An evolution in the acceptance of verbal responses could be detected by the second task. Nevertheless, the statistical analysis did not show statistical correlation between results of the tasks. The conclusion is that there are signs that the FRH might be valid, but future research must be conducted in order to assess the nature of this reassembly.
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