Anaphora in the interlanguage of English and Greek learners of L2 Spanish: A study based on the CEDEL2 corpus

Abstract

This thesis aims to explore the anaphoric 3rd person subject usage in the interlanguage of English and Greek learners of L2 Spanish at various proficiency levels. In addition, this study aims to provide a general account regarding the factors that constrain referential choices in Spanish L1. The integrated theoretical approach adopted here draws on relevant proposals from theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and corpus linguistics (Ariel, 1990; Arnold, 1998; Givón, 1983; Gundel, 2010; Kibrik, 2011; Lozano, 2016; Mitkov, 2002; Ryan, 2015). The empirical database of the investigation is CEDEL2 (Lozano, 2009a; Lozano & Mendikoetxea, 2013), a written corpus that contains production data from English and Greek learners of L2 Spanish. Additionally, CEDEL2 contains data from native speakers of Spanish as a control corpus. Crucially, all three subcorpora exhibit the same design principles. Hence, this is the first corpus-based study in Spanish L2 that compares three proficiency levels of two groups of learners (whose L1 differs with respect to the distribution of anaphoric subjects) against a native control group. The main purpose of this thesis is to test several L2 acquisition hypotheses, focusing on the role of crosslinguistic influence on discourse anaphora.