Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 271–296
Previous studies on Spanish adverb placement investigated how English natives reset their L1 [‑raise] to [+raise] but neglected the acquisition of adverb placement with haber (particularly, manner adverbs). The acquisition of haber/Participle/Adverb in Spanish depends on (1) the apparent lack of autonomy of haber forms, and (2) the neutral syntactic position of the adverb. To investigate the acquisition of “haber + manner adverb” by Spanish learners, 18 Spanish monolinguals and 33 L1 English Spanish learners completed a Grammaticality Judgment Task and an Explicit Production Task. Results suggest that (a) haber verbal forms lack autonomy; (b) había behaves as a syntactic clitic, and ha as a syntactic-phonological clitic; and (c) acquisition of “haber + manner adverb” order occurs successfully in learners.