The Project

These data and materials result from my dissertation, "Collective, Distributive, and Referential Interpretations of Possessive Structures in English and in Spanish: L1 and L2 Perspectives," carried out at the University of Georgia. Data were collected in central Mexico, on the US west coast, and in the southeastern US.

Spanish and English traditionally differ with respect to how speakers discuss their belongings. While Spanish speakers might utter, Mis hermanos y yo siempre nos lavábamos la cara antes de irnos a la cama, their English-speaking counterparts would state, My siblings and I would always wash out faces before going to bed. But are these differences in syntax and morphology a given? How do language learners express their ownership of objects, from body parts, to personal belongings? What do learners' and native speakers' use of possessive structures tell us about language acquisition in general? And how might we teach learners about possessive structures? Join me in exploring the fascinating world of possession!

Participants

• 29 adult speakers of L1 Spanish-L2 English residing in Mexico

Research Questions

1. Do bilinguals appear to acquire possessive structure syntax? How does this acquisition differ among bilingual groups? Are learners and native speakers more alike in their judgements of syntax as learners become more advanced (Pérez-Leroux, et al. 2002)?

2. Are bilinguals native-like in their mappings of semantics onto syntax? Do learners become more native-like as their proficiency increases (Gorissen 2019; Montrul & Ionin 2012)?

3. Will bilinguals produce similar possessive structure syntax and morphology in writing? Will learners' results be native-like in some contexts, but not in others? Do learners become more native-like as their proficiency increases (Pérez-Leroux, et al. 2002)?

4. Do advanced bilinguals' results support Sorace and colleagues' (2006, 2009) Interface Hypothesis?

5. What are the formal (syntactic and semantic) implications of the native speakers' results?

If you are interested in employing the Grammaticality Judgement Task, Picture-Sentence Matching Task, or Story Narration Task in your research, please contact me at caitlinesamples@gmail.com. Please cite these instruments as:

Samples, C. E. (in prep.). Collective, distributive, and referential interpretations of possessive structures: L1 and L2 perspectives. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Georgia.

References

• Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22(3). 339-368. 

• Sorace, A., & Serratrice, L. (2009). Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2). 195-210.

• Tsimpli, I., & Sorace, A. (2006). Differentiating interfaces: L2 performance in syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse phenomena. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 653-664). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.