Selective transfer in the acquisition of English double object constructions by Brazilian learners

Abstract

The present study investigates the acquisition of the English double object constructions (GOLDBERG, 1995) by Brazilian learners. We hypothesize that, due to first language (L1) influences, the prepositional ditransitive construction (John gave a book to Mary) will be acquired earlier, while the ditransitive construction (John gave Mary a book) will be part of the learner's interlanguages (SELINKER, 1972) only at the advanced level of proficiency. We also hypothesize that learners may transfer (ODLIN, 1989) the placement of the object pronoun in pre-verbal position from their L1 to their interlanguage in early stages of acquisition (João me deu um livro / *John me gave a book). We test our hypotheses by comparing the performance of three groups of learners (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) and native speakers of English on an acceptability judgment task used as a measure of learnability and generalization. Results confirm the order of acquisition of the English double object constructions predicted for native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Moreover, results suggest that, although mother tongue influences may have taken place, they do not do so pervasively, but rather selectively, corroborating the proposal by Kellerman (1983).• KEYWORD: Cross-linguistic influence. Selective transfer. Double object constructions.Bilingualism. introductionThe linguistic realizations of predicators -especially as expressed by verbs -and the arguments that accompany them to saturate a semantic configuration are taken as a central element of knowledge of language in several theoretical frameworks, such as Chomsky (

Brazilian Portuguese-English bilingualism does not afect metalinguistic awareness of L1 constraints in two argument structure constructions

“…his has been shown to be the case by results of the experimental study reported in Zara et al (2013). Indeed, the highly marked nature of the English dativized full NP recipient/beneiciary in Brazilian Portuguese is further attested by the absence of occurrences of this syntactic pattern in corpus data composed of samples of conversational discourseincluding casual and informal exchanges -produced by Brazilians from the area where this form has been proposed to be productive (Zara, 2014).…”

“…he irst argument is typically read as an agent, whereas the two internal (post-verb) arguments alternate in the roles of theme (entity being transferred) and recipient/beneiciary. he grammar of native (and at least some nonnative) speakers of English allows two distributions of objects in double object constructions, according to Zara et al (2013) and Zara (2014). he recipient or beneiciary may be realized by an NP that complements a preposition, in other words, that is the complement in a prepositional phrase (PP), therefore being an indirect object, whereas the theme is realized as a direct object complementing the main verb.…”

“…Scher (1996) and Gomes (2003) (apud Zara et al, 2013) report the availability of dativization of recipient/beneiciary in some dialectal varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, especially those spoken in areas of Minas Gerais and central Brazil. his sociolinguistic variation seems to be topped by pragmatic factors, as such occurrences are most likely connected to highly informal conversational discourse.…”

“…Nonetheless, just like the induced movement alternation, the English dative alternation and its several constraints have been demonstrated to be acquired by Brazilian Portuguese L1 learners of English L2 when they reach a certain proiciency threshold in the L2 (Zara et al, 2013).…”

The negative evidence hypothesis: the acquisition of the double-object construction by Brazilian-Portuguese English bilinguals

“…he double-object construction 3 (also referred to as the DOC), a common syntactic coniguration in English which encompasses a group of verbs with speciic semantic-pragmatic properties licensing two direct objects, has continued to attract the attention of researchers in the ield of second language acquisition (Agirre & Mayo, 2014;Agirre, 2015;Yang & Montrul, 2016;Zara, 2009;Zara, Oliveira & Souza, 2013). In English, a verb such as give, the most productive verb associated with said construction, can be realized by two diferent syntactic structures represented below, (14) and (15).…”