In this talk, we present a preliminary analysis of our ongoing investigation on the second language development of subject expression in Spanish by English-speaking learners. Our data come from simultaneous film narrations with native speakers of Spanish and learners at various proficiency levels. Spanish and English differ in the available forms for marking referential subjects. Whereas English almost always obligatorily expresses the verbal subject, Spanish often employs the so-called ‘null subject’, meaning that the subject is not phonetically expressed in spoken discourse. However, a number of discourse-pragmatic constraints condition when a null subject is used in Spanish, with rates varying by dialect, making this an acquisitional challenge for English-speaking learners. Join us for a discussion of how learners contend with a null subject in Spanish!
Friday 4 March 2022 at 3:00p on Zoom: umml.link/papers
