Edited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 25–48
Assuming the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere 2008, 2009), we argue that the acquisition of Exceptional Case Marking (ECM), Inflected Infinitive Structures (IIS) and Prepositional Infinitival Structures (PIC) by Spanish learners of European Portuguese (EP) presents different challenges. Two Acceptability Judgment Tasks show that identifying and reconfiguring the specific features associated with the PIC is a difficult task and that Spanish native speakers perform better in the case of ECM, whose properties can, for the most part, be transferred from the L1. However, the absence of an overt morphosyntactic counterpart for features related to Differential Object Marking (DOM) in EP represents a challenge. Finally, the results for the IIS present an interesting case study, since they force us to question the usual descriptions of the native grammar.