Intransitive/Inchoative Structures inL2 Spanish

Transfer, i.e. the influence of the first language (L1) in the interlanguage (IL), is a characteristic phenomenon of the process of second language (L2) acquisition. In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), different theories have been proposed to predict how and in which stages of this process the grammatical properties for the L1 are manifested in the IL. According to the theory of Full Transfer / Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996), the grammar of the L1 in its entirety is the initial state of the IL. Afterwards, depending on the properties of the L1 and L2, the linguistic input to which the learner is exposed acts as triggering factor in the reconstruction of the IL grammar. This restructuring process is conditioned by Universal Grammar (UG); for the most part, the IL complies with the restrictions imposed by UG during this whole process. Nevertheless, other approaches to transfer have explored the relationship between L1 influence and L2 development. The seminal work by Wode (1978) and Zobl (1980), among many others, on the L2 acquisition of negation, questions, and relative clauses, hypothesized and provided evidence in favor of the view that learners have to have attained a certain level of L2 development for L1 transfer to be observed. More recently, in the context of Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998, 2003; Håkansson et al. 2002), it has been proposed that the L2 learner does not completely transfer the L1 grammar at the beginning of L2 acquisition. According to this theory, transfer is developmentally moderated; the learner can only transfer L1 structures that can be analyzed by the incipient interlanguage processor. Along the same lines, in the Autonomous Induction Theory (Carroll 2002), L1 sentence parsing procedures automatically transfer at the onset of L2 acquisition in order to deal with L2 stimuli, but the L1 grammar does not transfer at that point. The transfer of L1 parsing procedures would lead to parsing failure, which in turn leads to language acquisition. In the InputProcessing Model (VanPatten 1996), L1 transfer does not take place directly during input processing, but during intake evaluation. In other words, the L1 is one of the hypothesis testing mechanisms that interact with intake representation to shape IL. The L2 learner would selectively use some L1 properties and not others. The goal of the present study is to contribute to this debate investigating the role that different types of grammatical transfer play in the acquisition of inchoative structures with se in L2 Spanish by English-speaking learners at different competence levels. In my previous research (Cabrera & Zubizarreta 2003, 2006; Cabrera 2008), a series of bidirectional studies on the acquisition of lexical and periphrastic English and Spanish causative structures, evidence of developmentally constrained grammatical transfer was found. In the case of lexical causatives, constructional properties were transferred before lexical specific features. In periphrastic causatives, a more salient surface property, such as word order was transferred before interpretive properties of this construction. Starting from the analysis of the syntactic and morphological properties of English and Spanish inchoative structures (The window broke / La ventana se rompió), the present study sets out to test the hypotheses of Full versus developmentally constrained transfer.