Event Details

HL2C-SLLAT Seminar: Ana Madeira, Alexandra Fieis, Joana Teixeira (NOVA University Lisbon)

Title: Clitics and null objects in L2 European Portuguese

Presenter(s): Ana Madeira, Alexandra Fieis, Joana Teixeira (NOVA University Lisbon)

How to join: The seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List or to the SLLAT mailing list to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

About: This is a joint event, co-organized by the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C) and the Second Language Learning and Teaching (SLLAT) Research Group.

Abstract:

Recent research has suggested that phenomena acquired late in L1 may be challenging in L2 (e.g., Tsimpli, 2014). Clitic placement and the distribution of overt and null objects in European Portuguese (EP) constitute appropriate testing grounds for this hypothesis, since research on monolingual L1 acquisition found that: (i) EP-speaking children begin by generalising enclisis to proclisis contexts (Duarte, Matos & Faria,1995) and acquire knowledge of some of these contexts late, following a fixed developmental route (Costa, Fiéis & Lobo,2015); (ii) children show early sensitivity to the discourse constraints on null objects in EP but become sensitive to animacy constraints late (Flores, Rinke & Sopata, 2020). To establish comparisons between L1 and L2 grammar acquisition, in this talk, we will present a study on the L2 acquisition of clitic placement and ongoing research on the distribution of overt and null objects in L2 EP. Participants were 20 L1 EP speakers and 30 L1 Spanish-L2 EP adult learners (10 intermediates, 10 advanced, 9 near-natives). Two tasks were used in these studies: an elicited oral production task and a speeded acceptability judgement task. Based on their results, we will address three questions that remain open in the literature: 1) Are the developmental routes of clitic placement and null objects in L2 EP similar to those found in L1 acquisition? 2) Are these phenomena fully acquired at the best attainable endstate in L2 acquisition, i.e. the near-native level, and, if not, which ones exhibit permanent divergence? 3) Are the linguistic phenomena which are hard at near-native and/or advanced stages the same ones that are acquired late in L1 EP?