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Complement Clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and acquisition
Edited by Ana Lúcia Santos and Anabela Gonçalves
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 17] 2018
► pp. 321–360

Inflected infinitives in L2 Portuguese

| CLUNL, FCSH, NOVA University of Lisbon
This study investigates the acquisition of morphosyntactic and interpretative properties of the Portuguese inflected infinitive by Chinese and Spanish speakers, using three experimental tasks. Assuming a Full Access approach (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) and the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), we predict that full acquisition of the morphosyntactic properties is possible, albeit showing L1 effects, and that interpretative properties develop later than narrow syntactic properties. Both predictions are supported. Our findings show that the advanced learners have largely acquired the relevant morphosyntactic properties, although there is evidence of developmental delays, particularly in the Spanish group. Moreover, both advanced groups performed non-targetlike regarding the interpretation of overt subjects; however, the Spanish group showed an advantage over the Chinese group with null subjects.
Keywords: inflected infinitive, European Portuguese, L2 acquisition, Full Access, Interface Hypothesis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The inflected infinitive
  • 3.The acquisition of the inflected infinitive
    • 3.1Previous studies
    • 3.2Goals of the present study
  • 4.The current study
    • 4.1Tasks
      • 4.1.1The morphological recognition task
      • 4.1.2The context task
      • 4.1.3The interpretation task
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Hypotheses
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1The morphological recognition task
    • 5.2The context task
    • 5.3The interpretation task
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.17.11mad
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