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Interface conditions on postverbal subjects: A corpus study of L2 English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2010

CRISTÓBAL LOZANO  and
AMAYA MENDIKOETXEA
CRISTÓBAL LOZANO*
Affiliation:
Universidad de Granada
AMAYA MENDIKOETXEA
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
*
Address for correspondence: Cristóbal Lozano, Universidad de Granada, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Granada 18071, Spaincristoballozano@ugr.es
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Abstract

This paper investigates how syntactic knowledge interfaces with other cognitive systems by analysing the production of postverbal subjects, V(erb)–S(ubject) order, in an L1 Spanish–L2 English corpus and a comparable English native corpus. VS order in both native and L2 English is shown to be constrained by properties operating at three interfaces: (i) lexicon–syntax: the verb is unaccusative (Unaccusative Hypothesis); (ii) syntax–discourse: the subject is focus (End-Focus Principle) and (iii) syntax–phonology: the subject is heavy (End-Weight Principle). We show that, since learners produce VS under the same interface conditions as native speakers, unaccusativity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for VS production. However, learners overproduce VS and make persistent errors in their syntactic encoding. Our findings support recent proposals that these difficulties stem from problems at coordinating syntactic knowledge with knowledge from other external systems, but they suggest that the nature of such difficulties is not external to the syntax.

Keywords

interfacescorpustransferprocessingunaccusative
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 475 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

This work has been supported by research grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (HUM2005-0127/FILO) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2008-01584 and EDU2008-01268). Previous versions were presented in Corpus Linguistics 2007, EUROSLA 17, and BUCLD 33. We wish to thank the audiences at those conferences and all members of the WOSLAC team (http://www.uam.es/woslac). We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers. All remaining errors are ours.

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