Pronominal deficits at the interface: new data from the CEDEL2 corpus

Abstract

Recent studies reveal that learners of L2 Spanish are sensitive to the formal syntactic mechanisms licensing overt and null pronominal subjects from early stages of acquisition, but they show residual deficits when their distribution is constrained by topic and focus at the syntax-discourse interface, even at advanced levels of proficiency. Importantly, previous research has assumed that all phi-features of the pronominal paradigm are equally vulnerable, but the current paper presents data from CEDEL2 showing that deficits are selective as they affect 3rd person animate features only.