Grammatical gender in native and non-native Spanish grammars

Florencia Franceschina

I Introduction One of the basic concerns of second language acquisition research is trying to find a satisfactory explanation for the differences between native and non-native grammars. This is of course a very broad area of investigation, since non-native language acquisition may differ from native language acquisition in many respects e.g., initial state, sequences of development, rate of acquisition, etc. This paper will address one specific aspect of this comparison, namely the grammatical representations of the endstate. More specifically, I will discuss the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 Spanish by two groups of very advanced speakers whose native languages are Italian and English. I will argue that one currently fashionable proposal which posits a critical period affecting the morphological module as responsible for the observed differences in mature native and non-native grammars is not wholly satisfactory since it cannot account for the data on acquisition of gender that will be presented here. I will further suggest that the observations are compatible with the view that L1 syntactic feature specification plays a major role in allowing or hindering the acquisition of L2 syntactic features. The paper is organised as follows: In section II I summarise the main claims of the morphological approach to divergent non-native grammars proposed by Lardiere (1998a, 1998b, 2000). Section III is a brief description of the relevant aspects of the gender systems of Spanish and Italian. I spell out some predictions that seem to follow logically from Laridieres proposal in section IV, and in section V I present some L2 Spanish acquisition data to test these predictions. Finally, section VI is a discussion of the empirical data and an evaluation of the adequacy of this morphological account of the differences between native and non-native grammars.

II Lardieres proposal Some second language acquisition researchers (e.g., Lardiere, 1998a; 1998b; 2000) have adopted the view that the differences between native and non-native endstate
1 e-mail: ffranc@essex.ac.uk

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grammars can be explained by proposing a critical period affecting the morphological module that interfaces with the Computational System. Divergent non-native speaker production is explained as the result of a breakdown in the mapping between syntax and morphology without having to posit divergent syntactic representations. Lardiere studied the production of a Chinese speaker of L2 English called Patty who arrived in the United States as an adult. The data examined were naturalistic, recorded in three interviews with the subject. She had been living in the United States for ten years by the time of the first recording, and the second and third recordings were made almost nine years later. Lardiere (1998a) found that Patty had mastered the marking of Case on English pronouns but she failed to mark Past Tense forms with the corresponding inflection in a high percentage of cases. The rate of suppliance of Past Tense marking in obligatory contexts was of approximately 34% throughout the nine-year span between the first interview and the second and third. In a study that followed (Lardiere, 1998b), she found that agreement marking on verbs in the Simple Present Tense was generally absent, especially in the case of thematic verbs, where she supplied the marking between 0% and 4.76% of the time. By contrast, Patty did not seem to have any problems with verb-raising, as shown by her almost perfect placement of verbs in negation and adverb contexts. Lardiere interpreted Pattys success at Case marking and non-verb-raising and her contrasting poor performance on Past and Present agreement inflection marking as confirmation of a dissociation between knowledge of abstract syntactic features and knowledge of surface morphological rules. Pattys performance on Case marking led her to conclude that her grammar had a fully and accurately specified T, with nativelike finiteness features, despite the low rate of suppliance of Past inflectional morphology. Similarly, she concluded that the L2 agreement and strength features had been successfully acquired given Pattys behaviour in verb-raising contexts, in spite of the low suppliance of agreement marking on verbs. Lardieres interpretation of the results was that Patty has completely native-like syntactic representations of the English Past Tense and agreement systems but has problems mapping this knowledge onto morphology. She further concluded that the difference between L1 and L2 acquisition lies outside the scope of the Computational System the implication being

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that syntax is not subject to a critical period- and that it originates in PF, in a postsyntactic stage. Example (1) below illustrates the type of mechanism with which Patty allegedly has problems. According to Lardiere, she has native-like knowledge of syntactic features so she knows that a lexeme1 meaning walk in the past is marked for [+past] but she cannot always match this bundle of syntactic features to the correct form of the verb (i.e., she doesnt always choose the right cell of the paradigm).

1) English verb paradigm for a lexeme meaning walk in the past: base (X) progressive 3PS past walk Xing Xs Xed

Like the English Past Tense and Simple Present 3rd person agreement, the Spanish gender system is also realised by inflectional morphology. L2 Spanish acquisition data will be examined in section 4 to see if other L2 learners have problems similar to Pattys. First, however, I will present a brief description of the gender systems of the languages involved.

III Spanish and Italian Syntactic gender and number features are realised morphologically in similar ways in Italian and Spanish, as you can see in examples (2) to (5) in Table 1: -o and a are the word endings for the singular masculine and feminine nouns in the biggest inflectional classes in both languages. These languages differ, however, in how plural masculine and feminine forms are realised: -os and as are the plural word endings in Spanish and i and e the Italian counterparts.

Lexeme is not used here in the sense of Levelt (1989), meaning the phonological representation of a word. It is used in the sense of Stump (1998), who defines the term as a unit of linguistic analysis which belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a particular meaning or grammatical function, and ordinarily enters into syntactic combinations as a single word (p. 13). See also Spencer (1991: 45) for a clear illustration of the latter meaning of lexeme, which is the one adopted here.

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Table 1: Prototypical Italian and Spanish gender and number marking Spanish 2.a) una casa a.FEM.SG house.FEM.SG a house Italian 2.b) una casa a.FEM.SG house.FEM.SG a house

3.a) dos casas two houses.FEM.PL two houses

3.b) due case two houses.FEM.PL two houses

4.a) un libro a.MASC.SG book.MASC.SG a book

4.b) un libro a.MASC.SG book.MASC.SG a book

5.a) dos libros two books.MASC.PL two books

5.b) due libri two books.MASC.PL two books

Spanish and Italian are typologically related. It is therefore not surprising that they share a number of morpho-syntactic properties such as verb classes (three main types in both languages ar, er and ir in Spanish and are, ere and ire in Italian) and noun classes (two genders masculine and feminine- in each case). Moreover, syntactic gender features interact with the form of nominals (namely their word endings) and their meaning (namely information on the sex of the referent) in similar ways in these languages. For example, while there is a tendency for feminine words to end in a and masculine words in o, and there is a tendency for feminine animate nouns to refer to females and for masculine animate nouns to refer to males, there is no strict one-toone correspondence between gender and form or gender and meaning in either language. (See Roca, 1989, for a more detailed discussion.) What we observe then is that a given form can be used to express both genders and a variety of meanings. For example, -a nouns can refer to males (e.g., poeta poet), females (e.g., pebeta girl in Argentine slang), males or females (e.g., atleta athlete), neither males nor females (e.g., cometa comet or kite, maleta suitcase) and they can trigger both feminine agreement (e.g., pebeta, atleta, cometa, maleta) or masculine agreement (e.g., poeta,

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atleta, cometa). This many-to-many relationship between gender, form and meaning is observed in both Spanish and Italian. One difference between the two languages relevant to our discussion relates to how feminine and masculine forms are realised morphologically in the plural. as and os are the prototypical plural forms in Spanish, while the Italian prototypical plural endings are e and i. For example, given a Spanish lexeme meaning house, the speaker has to decide which operation to apply given the paradigm shown in (6) 2. The speaker will apply the Xa operation or the Xas operation according to whether the lexeme is marked [+plural] or not. This mechanism is the same in Italian, the only difference being that the resulting plural form will be Xe instead of Xas, as shown in (7). Importantly, knowledge of the syntactic feature Gender is of little consequence in this case, as an L2 learner may successfully apply the rules illustrated below without knowing that the lexeme is marked [+feminine].

6)

lexeme

paradigm base (X) [-plural] [+plural] casXa Xas

Spanish

HOUSE

The reader may wonder why the base is cas- and not casa, the plural rule being Xs. There are both morphological reasons (related to other inflectional rules and derivational rules) and phonological reasons (related to the Spanish syllable structure) that would seem to indicate that the base form is cas-. For example, the diminutive of casa is casita, not *casaita; the derogative is casucha, not *casaucha; the augmentative is casota, not *casaota, and so on. Furthermore, other lexemes derived from casa confirm the inflectional trend: casero owner of a house (as a noun) or homemade (as an adjective), casero group of houses. There are also phonological reasons related to the principles of Spanish prosodic word formation. According to Harris (1991), who restricts his claims to all nonverb major categories in Spanish, the universal canonical shape of a complete prosodic word is bound to a prosodic template which specifies that lexical entries consist of certain template concatenations (e.g., CVC for cas-) plus a Marker realization (CVC]VC in this case, yielding CVC]V] (casa) in the singular and CVC]VC] (casas) in the plural). See Harris (1991: 55-59) for details.

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7)

lexeme

paradigm base (X) [-plural] [+plural] casXa Xe

Italian

HOUSE

In the case of adjectives (and other categories that are targets of gender) knowledge of gender features has more important consequences. Gender information becomes essential because adjectives, unlike nouns, do not have inherent gender but receive it by way of syntax from the noun they agree with. The only way for the learner to know which cell of the paradigm to choose is to know the number and gender of the relevant noun. This shows that Hocketts (1958: 231) oft-cited definition of genders as classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated words is quite appropriate. Examples (8) and (9) below show the type of information that is needed in order to be able to apply the correct morphological operation in the production of an adjective like white in Spanish and Italian.

8)

lexeme

paradigm base (X): blanc[-plural] [+plural] [+fem] Xa Xas [-fem] Xo Xos

Spanish:

WHITE

9)

lexeme

paradigm base (X): biank[-plural] [+plural] [+fem] Xa Xe [-fem] Xo Xi

Italian

WHITE

English is not discussed in this section because it has no grammatical gender system. Some linguists (e.g., Corbett, 1991: 5) have adopted the view that it has a pronominal

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gender system since it shows agreement of the type the girl she. However, this is a purely semantic type of agreement and the approach here will be to keep this type of agreement separate from formal gender systems like those of Spanish or Italian.

IV Predictions on gender acquisition that follow from Lardiere In this section focus will be on categories other than nouns which are targets of gender (determiners and adjectives) since to use these forms correctly gender information is essential. A note on the expected error rates is in place at this stage. Lardieres claim is that speakers with long exposure to an L2 who are near-native-like will have persistent problems with some aspects of mapping from syntactic representations to morphological forms. The syntactic representation will, however, be target-like. In testing this prediction in the domain of gender agreement, it should be noted that the number of tokens revealing morphological problems will be relatively small. Let us first consider the acquisition of L2 Spanish by native speakers of Italian. If the problem non-native speakers have to face was restricted to finding the right word forms to realise the L2 gender features (which are otherwise the same as those of the L1) we would predict that choosing the gender of the agreeing categories in o and a nominal contexts will not be problematic for Italian speakers of Spanish whereas os/-i and as/-e contexts might be problematic. A malfunctioning of the morphological module should result in agreement between nominals with features encoded by means of the same markings in both languages being more successful than those encoded differently in Spanish and Italian. When the syntactic

specification/morphological form matching is the same in the L1 and the L2, there should be no reason to expect problems in L2 acquisition. Conversely, we might expect problems in those cases where the matching is different in the L1 and the L2, given the assumption that the morphological module is subject to a critical period and cannot establish new syntax/morphology matchings as successfully as in L1 acquisition. This is summarised in predictions (10) and (11) below.

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10) Prediction 1: Italian speakers of L2 Spanish should have no difficulty producing correct gender agreement between determiners, adjectives and nouns in the following noun contexts: -o (masculine singular) contexts -a (feminine singular) contexts

11) Prediction 2: Italian speakers of L2 Spanish should have difficulty producing correct gender agreement between determiners, adjectives and nouns in the following noun contexts: -os (masculine plural) contexts -as (feminine plural) contexts -e (masculine/feminine singular) contexts3 -i (masculine/feminine singular) contexts

It is not very clear what the exact predictions would be for English speakers of L2 Spanish as in this case there is no matching of any sort in the L1 given that gender features are absent. The approach to the English speaker data will therefore be exploratory.

V L2 Spanish data 1 The subjects Two of the subjects were English, two Italian and two native controls were used to provide a measure of comparison. All the L2 speakers were first exposed to Spanish after puberty. The English subjects have a slightly earlier age of first exposure to the language than the Italians, and the Italians have longer periods of total exposure (due to their age). Except for Nina, all the others have had longer exposure to the L2 than Patty. Table 2 provides more detailed information about each subject.

Spanish has e and i nominal word endings, like Italian, which can be found in feminine or masculine lexical items. For example, una estudiante inteligente an intelligent female student, or este nene grande this big boy. Unlike Italian, however, these word endings never mark plural number in Spanish.

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Table 2: Information on the subjects L1 Italian Lola Age: 71 Age of arrival: 23 Total no. of years spent in Spanish-speaking country: 48 Maria Age: 73 Age of arrival: 23 Total no. of years spent in Spanish-speaking country: 50 L1 English Martin Age: 50 Age of arrival: 16 Total no. of years spent in Spanish-speaking country: 24 Nina Age: 55 Age of arrival: 17 Total no. of years spent in Spanish-speaking country: 7+ L1 Spanish Jos Florencia Age: 75 Age: 25
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2 The recordings and data analyses The recordings were made in Argentina in July and August 1999. The subjects were recorded during informal conversation, in the same way that Patty was recorded. No special elicitation techniques were used. The results shown here are from 15-20 minute excerpts from those recordings. All the contexts for manifestation of gender were identified and coded according to the form of the triggers in each context. The contexts were classified according to whether the nouns (i.e., the triggers)

1. were feminine singular and ended in a 2. were masculine singular and ended in o 3. were feminine plural and ended in as 4. were masculine plural and ended in os 5. were masculine or feminine singular and ended in e 6. were masculine or feminine singular and ended in i

Although she has lived in a Spanish-speaking country for seven years only, she has had considerably more exposure to the language than this would indicate. One reason is that her husband is Spanish and they

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If any of the words involved in gender agreement with a noun in a given context were not correct, the context counted as incorrect. For example, if there was a mistake on the noun, the determiner or the adjective in a [det+noun-a+adj] context, this counted as a mistake on an a context. What was taken into account for the purpose of classifying contexts was the form of the trigger of gender only (i.e., the noun).

3 Results and discussion The graphs below illustrate the frequencies of occurrence of forms according to the six context types described above. The tops of the bars represent the number of contexts where there were mistakes (if any) and the lower portions of the bars represent the frequencies of target-like uses.

a) Spanish native speakers

Graph 1: Total no. of contexts surveyed: 52. Total no. of -a, -o, -as, -os, -e, -i contexts: 47

                    

have always spoken in Spanish at home. Another reason is that she spends considerable amounts of time in

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Graph 2: Total no. of contexts surveyed: 105. Total no. of -a, -o, -as, -os, -e, -i contexts: 96

 "!# / + $ , $&+ . , .&+ ', '-+ ) , + 021 023 0214 02354 026 798 * ) % $&% $('

b) Italian speakers
Graph 3: Total no. of contexts surveyed: 95. Total no. of -a, -o, -as, -os, -e, -i contexts: 85

:;=<?> @ J @EI C J CEI AJ AHI J I K2L K2M K2L5N K2MBN K2O P"Q F @ G AHC R MBS S O RBT @BA CED

Spanish-speaking countries because of her job.

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Graph 4: Total no. of contexts surveyed: 175. Total no. of -a, -o, -as, -os, -e, -i contexts: 55

UV>XWZY?> C J CEI A AJ AHI J I K2L K2M @ K2L5N @ K2MBN \ K2O A P"Q AH[ AHG F

Q] R B M S S O RBT R M SSO R T

c) English speakers
Graph 5: Total no. of contexts surveyed: 47. Total no. of -a, -o, -as, -os, -e, -i contexts: 31

UV>XW?^Y?_ AHC AHI @ [ D F C I K2L K2M K2L5N K2MBN K2O [ J F @ F A P"Q @ J Q] R B M S S O RBT R M SSO R T

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Graph 6: Total no. of contexts surveyed: 146. Total no. of -a, -o, -as, -os, -e, -i contexts: 97

`ba?c9d i h e i E e h g i g h E j i j h E fHi fh i h k2l k2m k2l5n k2mBn

eBf g f e

q rsBmBt t oBsBu svmBt t ovsBu fg f k2o

fg

f p"q

As you can see from Maria and Lolas results, they do not make more mistakes in os, -as, -e or i contexts than in a or o contexts. Lola did not make any mistakes in any of these six contexts. Maria made some mistakes but only in a and o contexts, just the opposite of what was predicted in (10) and (11). In the case of the English subjects, who do not have any similar morphological operation in their L1, mistakes do not seem to cluster according to form either. These data would seem to indicate that inflectional marking type does not make a difference for either the Italians, who were expected to perform better in a and o contexts then in the others, or the English group, for which no specific predictions were made. To summarise, the results from the Italian speakers do not seem to lend support to an explanation of non-native speaker production based only on problems mapping syntactic knowledge to form when the morphological operation involved is different in the L1 and the L2. The results from the English speakers seem to indicate that the morphological operations involved do not have major consequences for mistake patterns even when these operations are not used in the L1 morphology. Given the small number of mistakes found (which is to be expected from subjects with this level of proficiency) and the size of the samples, the results of any

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quantitative analysis of the data need to be taken with caution. A qualitative analysis should provide further support to any claims to be made on the basis of these observations. The first thing to note is that none of the mistakes made were on nouns. They were all on categories that are targets of gender. This result is unexpected given that nouns, adjectives and determiners all share the same set of word endings in Spanish. Moreover, as Harris (1991) points out, [nouns] display a greater variety of both word markers and marker-gender associations (p. 36). If there was a deficit in morphological mechanisms affecting gender marking on adjectives and determiners it would be logical to expect the same type of effect on nouns, but this is not the case. The same set of morphological operations is required to inflect all of these categories and it is difficult to see how a deficiency restricted to the morphological module can explain why gender target categories are affected but not gender triggers. Another relevant observation is the fact that there were no mistakes involving number in any of the samples. This is unexpected in the case of the Italians given that the morphological realisations of the number feature are different from the Spanish counterparts (cf. Table 1). Closer examination of the mistakes made by each subject reveals an important difference between the performance of the Italians and the English speakers. Maria made five mistakes, four on definite articles and one on a clitic pronoun. The utterances where they occurred are listed below:

12)

Ma *lagua despus se volvi a ir Pero el agua despus se volvi a ir But then the water disappeared again

13)

Porque estbamos ms cerca *lAdritico Porque estbamos ms cerca del Adritico Because we were closer to the Adriatic

14)

Por eso *lalcanc enseguida a agarrarlo Por eso lo alcanc enseguida a agarrarlo That is why I manage to learn it [Spanish] quickly

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15)

Yo me acuerdo *lo primer da Yo me acuerdo el primer da I remember the first day

16)

Saba *li dialecto Saba el dialecto I spoke the dialect

Examples (12) to (14) involve contexts where the definite article is immediately followed by a word beginning with a vowel sound. In Italian, the choice of the correct form of the definite article depends on the first sound of the following word. The masculine singular definite article can take the forms lo, il or l, the feminine singular article can take the forms la or l and the masculine plural article can the forms i or gli, depending on the initial sound of the following word. The information needed to come up with the correct form is both syntactic the gender and number features have to be known- and phonological the initial sound of the following word needs to be known. This is not the case in Spanish, where syntactic information is all that is needed (except in the case of a very small group of nouns beginning with accented /a/; see Costa et al., 1999 for further details). It may be the case that there was some transfer of phonological strategies in these cases and not a problem with gender information. The clitic pronoun in (15) and the definite article in (16) do not seem to follow the Italian phonological rule of choice of form, but it is worth noting that lo in (15) is homophonous with the so-called neuter article and the accusative masculine clitic pronoun, both of which take masculine gender agreement. It is difficult to explain li in (16), given that this form does not exist in either Spanish or Italian, but at least we can say that it does not seem to violate the gender marker rules of Spanish. Thus misapplied phonological rules, possibly due to L1 influence, may lie at the root of at least some of the mistakes that Maria made. Martins and Ninas mistakes cannot be explained in this way however. There is no obvious phonological link between them. There is little doubt that the problem in these cases is directly related to the syntax, as illustrated in the examples below:

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17)

Me va a quedar *corto la conferencia Me va a quedar corta la conferencia The conference will be too short for me

(Martin)

18)

*Todos estn ya pegadas Todas estn ya pegadas They are all stuck already

(Martin, talking about etiquetas stickers)

19)

sacar todas, de a *uno sacar todas, de a una to take them all out, one by one

(Martin, talking about revistas magazines)

20)

En Argentina hay *estos guas En Argentina hay estas guas In Argentina there are travel guides like these

(Nina)

(Nina) 21) S, tiene las patas con una forma muy extraa [] *los tienen ms largas aun S, tiene las patas con una forma muy extraa [] las tienen ms largas aun Yes, it has legs of a strange shape [] they have still longer ones

It could be argued that the problem is restricted to wrong gender assignment and not related to gender agreement. This would mean that the problem is not necessarily syntactic but only to do with the learning of vocabulary. For example, in (20) it could be argued that Nina thinks that guas is masculine and therefore produces masculine agreement on related words. While it may be the case that gender assignment is a problem for non-native speakers, this does not seem to be enough to explain all of the English subjects mistakes however. For example, in (21) Nina produces feminine gender agreement in the definite article las and the adjective largas agreeing with patas, but she fails to produce feminine gender agreement on the clitic object las and produces masculine agreement instead. It is clear that it is not the case that she has assigned the wrong gender to patas, but she has faulty agreement. The same could be argued of examples (17) to (19).

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VI Concluding remarks While Lardieres proposal has the advantage of constituting a unified account of first and second language acquisition insofar as syntactic knowledge is concerned, it runs into problems when faced with empirical data like those presented here. If, on the other hand, adult L2 learners were limited to the functional feature specification of their L1, Italians would not be expected to be significantly different from Spanish native-speakers in their gender representations, since these features are already specified in their L1, whereas the English speakers would be expected to have more difficulties given that English grammars do not have such feature specification. If we had assumed the presence of the relevant syntactic features in the L1 to be a requirement for successful acquisition of the features in the L2, then our predictions would have been different from (10) and (11) and more along the lines of (22) to (24) below:

22) Prediction 1: English and Italian speakers should be able to acquire categorical plural markings on adjectives and determiners because there is a syntactic number feature in their L1 that can be transferred.

23) Prediction 2: English speakers should have persistent difficulty with gender agreement marking because their L1 grammars have no underlying gender feature.

24) Prediction 3: Italian speakers should acquire categorical gender marking because their L1 grammars have this syntactic feature.

The results presented here seem to be compatible with such a view. Further evidence from examination of larger data samples and experimental data is undoubtedly required before any definite claims can be made. This work is currently under development. Nevertheless, these data can be taken as initial evidence that divergent syntactic representations may lie at the root of the observed differences between natives and non-native speakers.

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Acknowledgements Significant portions of this paper were presented at EUROSLA 10 and student conferences held at the University of Essex and the RCEAL, University of Cambridge. I am very grateful to the respective audiences for their comments and suggestions and to Roger Hawkins for his guidance and support.

VII References Corbett, G. 1991: Gender. Cambridge: CUP. Costa, A., Sebastian Galles, N. Miozzo, M. and Camarazza, A. 1999: The gender congruity effect: evidence from Spanish and Catalan. Language and Cognitive Processes 14(4), 381-391. Harris, J. 1991: The exponence of Spanish gender. Linguistic Inquiry 22(1), 27-62. Hockett, C.F. 1958: A course in modern linguistics. New York: Macmillan. Lardiere, D. 1998a: Case and Tense in the fossilized state grammar. Second Language Research 14(1), 1-26. Lardiere, D. 1998b: Dissociating syntax from morphology in a divergent L2 end-state grammar. Second Language Research 14(4), 359-375. ---- 2000: Mapping features to forms in SLA. In Archiblad, J., editor, Second language acquisition and linguistic theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Levelt, W. 1989: Speaking: from intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Roca, I. 1989: The organisation of grammatical gender. Transactions of the Philological Society 7, 1-32. Spencer, A. 1991: Morphological theory. Oxford: Balckwell. Stump, G. 1998: Inflection. In Spencer, A. and Zwicky, A., editors, The handbook of morphology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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