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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 32, Utrecht
Edited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 25–48

Chapter 2
Infinitival complement clauses

Data from L2 acquisition of European Portuguese

| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon

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.

Keywords: syntax, L2 acquisition, feature reassembly hypothesis, European Portuguese, Peninsular Spanish, infinitival complements, inflected infinitive, prepositional infinitival construction, causative verbs, perception verbs
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Infinitival complement clauses in European Portuguese and in Peninsular Spanish
    • 2.1Exceptional case marking (ECM) and inflected infinitive structure (IIS)
    • 2.2Prepositional infinitival structure (PIC)
  • 3.Non-native acquisition of European Portuguese infinitival complement clauses: A case of feature reassembly
  • 4.Experimental design: Methodology and participants
  • 5.Acceptability judgment tasks: Data analysis
    • 5.1Exceptional case marking and inflected infinitive structure
    • 5.2Prepositional infinitival construction
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.357.02car
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