The effects of lexical properties of nouns and verbs on L2 and heritage differential object marking
Description
TitleThe effects of lexical properties of nouns and verbs on L2 and heritage differential object marking
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-05 (degree)
Extent331 pages
DescriptionDifferential Object Marking (DOM) is a phenomenon that is present in more than 300 languages (Bossong, 1989) and is the marking of the direct object depending on its syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic conditions. Spanish is part of the DOM languages and is marked with the Spanish a depending on the animacy and definiteness features of the direct object. However, English is not sensitive to the animacy and definiteness of the direct object which makes it unnecessary to mark it. Therefore, the study of the acquisition of the DOM among L2 learners and Heritage Speakers (HS) of Spanish makes it a great area of study to investigate how a speaker acquires, maintains, and develops a linguistic feature that is not present in the L1/dominant language. In addition, the current study examines how lexical properties of verbs and nouns affect the acquisition of the Spanish DOM. This approach is based on the notion that the frequency of activation of lexical items is relevant for the process of acquisition. For that reason, this study also investigates the relative frequency of vocabulary items in the input and the amount of exposure and use to Spanish by examining the social circle of the speakers.
Previous studies have investigated DOM among L2 learners and HSs of Spanish by controlling the variables of animacy, definiteness (Montrul & Bowles, 2009; Montrul and Sánchez-Walker, 2013; Montrul, Bhatt and Girju, 2015), agentiveness of the subject, and telicity of the predicate (Guijarro-Fuentes, 2011; 2012; Guijarro-Fuentes & Marinis, 2007; 2009; Guijarro-Fuentes & Pires, 2015; Nediger, Pires & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2016). However, there were no clear statistically significant variables found that contributed to the accuracy or omission of DOM. Therefore, the present study aims to control two variables that were not previously taken into account which are the subcategorization of the verbs in terms of Verb Class and the frequency of the lexical items. The current study will test previous proposals that account for the difficulty and variability in L2 acquisition due to the reassembly of features in the L2 and that the mapping of the features into morphology is the last stage to be acquired (Lardier, 2009; Jiang, 2000). In the case of HSs, this study will test the Activation Approach (Putnam & Sanchez, 2013) that argues that the stability of the Heritage Language (HL) depends on how frequently the bilingual has been able to activate the HL for production and comprehension purposes. This is why proficiency, and the lexical frequency will be proxies to the amount of activation of the HL.
A total of 159 participants (L2 learners and HSs) after completing several screening tasks completed an elicited production task, an acceptability judgment task, and a self-reported lexical frequency task. Results show that both L2 and HSs experienced great difficulty and variability for Verb Class 2, conditions that can take as complements both animate and inanimate direct objects (verbs such as ver ‘to see’ or llevar ‘to bring’). Additionally, the effects of lexical frequency were only found in the advanced L2 learners and the intermediate HSs, meaning that they were able to produce and accurately rate the grammaticality more DOM depending on the amount of frequency of the lexical item. Additionally, the patterns of language use and exposure were significant in the acceptability judgment task of DOM for both L2 learners and HSs. These findings support previous proposals that depending on the amount the L2/HL activation, speakers will experience stability or variability in the language (Putnam & Sánchez, 2013).
There are several contributions of this study: First, it is the first empirical study that investigates the effects of the subcategorization of the verb (animate, inanimate, both) during the production and receptive knowledge of Spanish DOM among both L2 learners and HSs. Second, it is the first study that investigates how the lexical frequency of the verb modulates the acquisition of DOM among L2 learners. Third, specifically for HSs, it investigates the pattern of language use and exposure and how it modulates the production and receptive knowledge of DOM by examining the social network/or social circle of the HSs by dividing it into two sections: the inner circle (family and friends) and the outer circle (shops, workplace, places for practical needs). Keywords: differential object marking, second language, heritage language, lexical frequency, social network.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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