Interfaces in the interpretation of mood alternation in L2 Spanish

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of one written task testing the interpretation of mood choice in if-conditional constructions in L2 Spanish: a linguistic task of conditional utterances containing both regular and irregular indicative and subjunctive forms was completed by 48 L1 French and 40 L1 English speakers, and by an L1 Spanish control group (n = 35). Results show a similar pattern in the answers of both experimental groups despite the varying degree of similarity and disparity among the languages. We adopt a cognitive pragmatic perspective for the analysis of the results in connection with the various kinds of effects created by mood alternation in the constructions studied. Furthermore, in relation to current SLA debates (Lardiere 2008, 2009), our findings demonstrate that feature re-assembly in L2 Spanish is not trouble-free, as simple current feature accounts would advocate, even if those features exist in the learners’ L1.

Normas pedagógicas contra normas lingüísticas en la selección del modo en español como L2: interfaz morfológico-semántica

“…Pedagogical rules do not seem to adapt to the findings of second language acquisition research, since they mainly focus on verbal morphology (Collentine et al 2002), followed by syntax with scarcely any associations to the semantic interface and an almost complete disregard of pragmatics. SLA studies have demonstrated that the mood contrast in Spanish is a multi-conditioned system that needs further investigation in order to better understand how native speakers use it (Pérez-Cortés, 2016; Ahern et al, 2014;Aponte and Ortiz, 2015;Massery and Fuentes, 2014;Botero, 2017;Iverson et al, 2008).…”