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Michael Iverson and Jason Rothman
78-92 (complete pdf)
Couched within the contemporary discussion of L2 Interface Vulnerability (see Sorace 2005), the authors test the L2 acquisition of native English-speakers of Portuguese inflected infinitives, focusing on an associated semantic poverty-of-the-stimulus genericity entailment observed by Ambar (1998). The authors demonstrate how convergence on a grammar with inflected infinitives in the present case requires the resetting of two unique parameters, the null-subject parameter (a syntactic parameter) and the inflection parameter (a morphological parameter). The authors provide experimental data from intermediate and advanced learners of L2 Portuguese as well as a native control. The results indicate that parameter resetting is clearly possible by the advanced level, inclusive of the full convergence on syntax-semantics interface properties that fall out from their resetting. The authors discuss these findings as they relate to current theoretical debates within adult generative L2 acquisition.
Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 10th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium
edited by Joyce Bruhn de Garavito and Elena Valenzuela
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-427-0 library binding
v+311 pages
publication date: 2008
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA