Research on second language Spanish encompasses a sophisticated and broad-reaching body of work. Nevertheless, there is a bias in this literature toward English-speaking learners. The implication of this bias is that our search for universal trends of acquisition is undermined by an inability to distinguish between challenges that are specific to…

This study contributes to current trends of heritage speaker bilingualism research by examining the syntax of so-called Spanish dative-experiencer predicates ("gustar"-like verbs). Building on previous findings (e.g., Silva-Corvalán 1994; Toribio and Nye 2006), it is hypothesized that Spanish heritage speakers can project an optional…

The aim of a discourse-pragmatic approach to teaching the indicative/subjunctive contrast in Spanish is to engage students to move beyond grammar and semantics and enter the domain of language use in complete texts. Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research have mostly focused on the morphology, semantics and syntactic aspects of…

Linguistic research has shown that Spanish speakers mark clauses with the subjunctive when they consider the information value of those clauses to be low. Despite widespread agreement among linguists, however, the information-value approach to the subjunctive is largely ignored in textbooks and workbooks. This article explains how the…

The present study examines the nature of the Spanish rhotics experimentally, investigating the possibilities that the trill is best understood as deriving from an underlying geminate or that the tap and trill may be separate phonemes. In order to explore these two theories, a behavioral task was designed exploiting the absence of native words in…

The aim of the present paper is to provide an overview of the so-called "Spanglish" phenomenon and its linguistic repertoires (code-switching utterances). We propose that it is necessary to link all different forms of analysis in order to verify hypotheses regarding the relationship among social, linguistic, and cognitive processes behind…

I provide an update on the state of the art of the research--the last one being Collentine (2003)--on the acquisition of the function of the subjunctive and mood selection, as well as the research's implications for pedagogy. The article considers what we currently know about the role of universal grammar, psycholinguistic perspectives on the…

Provides representative statistics concerning the degree and rank-ordering of irregularity among verb tenses of Spanish. Indicates that the present is the most morphologically irregular of all Spanish tenses. The least irregular tense is the imperfect. (SL)

Regardless of the syntactic variation of the direct object "a" in Spanish, a great deal of semantic unity underlies its use. Argues that it carries an invariant meaning that is present in every use of the form, and, concomitantly, its absence before a direct object carries an equally invariant meaning within the systematic semantic structure of…

Investigates the apparent correspondences for infinitival "to," and analyzes the basis for the common error of equating it with "a"--the mistaken identification of an English grammatical complementizer with a Spanish lexical preposition. (SL)