Anaphora in the Interlanguage of Spanish Learners of English

Authors

  • Elisa Vázquez Iglesias Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199811019

Abstract

Much work has been done lately on the acquisition of English reflexives by L2 learners (cf. Matsumura [1994], Bennet [1996] or Wakabayashi [1996], among others). The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to examine an experiment that has been carried out with Spanish learners of English and, second, to show how imprecise the conclusions that we may reach from this type of experiments are. Thus, while previous work on Japanese and Serbo-Croatian seems to indicate that Second Language Acquisition is systematic and, further, that Universal Grammar is available in acquisition, I suggest that the results obtained in the experiment reported in this paper lead to the opposite claims.

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References

BENNET, S. 1994. “Interpretation of English reflexives by adolescent speakers of Serbo-Croatian.” Second Language Research 3.2: 55-86.

CHOMSKY, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.

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MANZINI, R., and K. WEXLER. 1987. “Parameters, Binding Theory and Learnability.” Linguistic Inquiry 18: 413-44.

MATSUMURA, M. 1994. “Japanese Learners’ Acquisition of the Locality Requirement of English Reflexives: Evidence for Retreat of Overgeneralization.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 9: 5-42.

SCHACHTER, J. 1996. “Learning and Triggering in Adult L2 Acquisition.” In Performance and Competence in Second Language Acquisition. Ed. G. Brown, M. Malmkjaer and J. Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 70-4.

THOMAS, M. 1995. “Acquisition of the Japanese Reflexive zibun and Movement of Anaphors in Logical Form.” Second Language Research 4.3: 206-234.

YUAN, B. 1994. “Second Language Acquisition of Reflexives Revisited.” Language 70: 532-45.

WAKABAYASHI, S. 1996. “The Nature of Interlanguage: SLA of English Reflexives.” Second Language Research 5.3: 266-303.

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Published

1998-12-31

How to Cite

Elisa Vázquez Iglesias. (1998). Anaphora in the Interlanguage of Spanish Learners of English. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 19, 173–188. https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199811019

Issue

Vol. 19 (1998): Volume 19 (1998)

Section

ARTICLES: Language and linguistics

License

Copyright (c) 1998 Elisa Vázquez Iglesias

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.