The L2 Acquisition of Spanish Focus : A case of incomplete and divergent grammars

"This paper explores the second language acquisition of Spanish word order with the aim of analysing the availability of optional forms in advanced non-native grammars. In contrast to English, Spanish word order is flexible and the elements of a sentence can appear in more than one configuration (e.g. SV, VS). This may appear to be a case of free alternation. However, such optionality is only apparent as each of the configurations is constrained by defined syntactic rules (depending on the type of verb) and pragmatic rules (depending on the type of information encoded in the sentence). Consequently, this phenomenon is ideal for testing hypotheses about optionality in endstate L2 grammars since two variations of the same structure are present in the input which in turn means that L2 learners need to figure out both the rules that constrain each of the forms and their context of use. In this paper we explore whether this ambiguity in the input may delay the acquisition of these forms until an advanced stage such that alternate forms will still be present in the grammar of near-native speakers of Spanish. Our hypothesis builds upon the assumption that in developing grammars the emergence and persistence of optional forms are highly dependent on the level of systematisation and robustness of the input subjects receive. Consequently, we predict that in the case of word order variation in Spanish advanced learners would go though a persistent stage of optionality since the evidence they receive is not systematic enough to make proper generalisations that would allow them to map each of the forms with its context of use