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The adult L2 acquisition of the Saxon Genitive: Italian and Spanish results

The main goal of this paper is to give evidence for the general hypothesis that adult subjects learning a second language have access to Universal Grammar (UG) at all stages. According to our new findings, L1 transfer is not only what is at hand in the acquisition of the Saxon Genitive by Spanish sp...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Revista española de lingüística aplicada 2011-01, Vol.24, p.61-72
Main Author: Alvarez, Ma Angeles Escobar
Format: Article
Language:Spanish
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The main goal of this paper is to give evidence for the general hypothesis that adult subjects learning a second language have access to Universal Grammar (UG) at all stages. According to our new findings, L1 transfer is not only what is at hand in the acquisition of the Saxon Genitive by Spanish speaking adults, since Spanish grammar bans the presence of determiners in prenominal possessors (e.g. *el/un mi amigo), and yet Spanish adults produce the same type of errors found with Italian adults, according to results reported by Bennati and Domenico (2007), whose L1 allows the possibility of having a prenominal possessor following the determiner (il/un mio amico). KEY WORDS. Saxon Genitive, English L2 Acquisition, Critical Period, Interlanguage, Universal Grammar, Full Access/ Transfer, Parameters. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es aportar una prueba empirica a favor de la hipotesis de acceso a la Gramatica Universal por parte de hablantes adultos que adquieren la lengua inglesa como lengua extranjera. De una forma contrastiva, se comparan los resultados obtenidos por parte de hablantes italianos (Bennati and Domenico 2007) con los obtenidos aqui por parte de hablantes espanoles que adquieren las formas de genitivo en ingles en un contexto formal. En concreto se examinan los tipos de errores, muchas veces similares, que se producen en uno y otro grupo de sujetos a pesar de que parten de unas opciones parametricas distintas (il/un mio amico vs.*el/un mi amigo). PALABRAS CLAVE. Genitivo Saxon, Adquisicion del ingles como L2, Periodo Critico, Interlengua, Gramatica Universal, Acceso Pleno/Transferencia, Parametros.
ISSN:0213-2028
2254-6774