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Grammatical Gender in the Interlanguage of English- Speaking Learners of Portuguese

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Grammatical Gender in the Interlanguage of English- Speaking Learners of Portuguese Volume 9, October 2015 Article 7 Portuguese in the World Today Grammatical gender in the interlanguage of English- speaking learners of Portuguese Edvan Brito Defense Language Institute Recommended Citation Brito, Edvan. (2015). “Grammatical gender in the interlanguage of English-speaking learners of Portuguese.” Portuguese Language Journal: Vol. 9, Article 7. GRAMMATICAL GENDER 2 Abstract Second-language acquisition strategies are a result of the cognitive processing second-language learners go through in order to make sense of the language they are learning, including the usage of lexical items – borrowing – as well as structural features from L1 to L2 or an additional language. One way to categorize this kind of interference is to conceptualize it as a feature of the learners’ interlanguage or their developing second language knowledge (Gass & Selinker 2008; Lightbown & Spada 2006). Depending on the level of structural proximity between L1 and L2, grammar, especially morphology, constitutes one of the most difficult linguistic features to be acquired by a second-language learner (DeKeyser 2005). For example, nouns phrases constitute a major cause of cross-linguistic influence in the L2 or L3 of English-speaking learners of Portuguese because of their distinct representation in these two languages, especially the difference in gender and number agreement, word order, among other factors. Using the interlanguage theoretical framework and current understandings of cross-linguistic influence, the present study aims to analyze grammatical gender agreement in the written production of English-speaking learners of Portuguese. GRAMMATICAL GENDER 3 Grammatical gender in the interlanguage of English-speaking learners of Portuguese Introduction Grammatical gender agreement represents one of the major difficulties English speakers encounter when learning a richly inflected language like Portuguese. This problem arises from the fact that English does not require as many inflections in its nominal system as Portuguese does. Due to this difference, learners may take longer to use effectively the grammatical gender rules in the target language. With this in mind, I used the interlanguage theoretical framework (Gass & Selinker 2008; Lightbown & Spada 2006) to analyze the features of grammatical gender agreement in the written production of English-speaking learners of Portuguese. By doing so, I also looked at some of the strategies learners used to make sense of noun phrases (NPs) in the target language, considering the issue of cross-linguistic influence. The analysis of the corpus suggests that gender mismatch tends to be motivated by structural transfer from English to Portuguese, as the word classes mostly affected by it were adjectives, articles, and possessive pronouns, which are not inflected for gender in the learners’ L1. In addition, NPs with a relatively simple representation (two lexical items) represented the majority of non-target-like gender agreement cases. Moreover, three out of four cases of non-target-like gender agreement occurred in words that had a gender marker of masculine (-o) or feminine (-a). Although not conclusive, these findings are important as they shed light on some of the important elements that need to be taken into account by instructors planning to help their students excel in the learning of the grammatical gender rules of Portuguese. The study of language contact has led to the idea that second-language acquisition (SLA) strategies represent one of the mechanisms by which contact-induced language change occurs. Thomason (2001) discusses at least four strategies learners use in trying to make sense of their GRAMMATICAL GENDER 4 second language. The first one is negotiation, a process by which “learners change their language (A) to approximate what they believe to be the patterns of another language or dialect (B)” (p. 142). The second strategy has to do with the gap-filling approach, which consists in using material of the native language whenever there is a lack of knowledge of how to speak something in the target language (TL). Another strategy is to transfer structural patterns from the learner’s native language to construct their version of the grammar of the target language. The final strategy discussed by Thomason “is to ignore distinctions, especially marked distinctions, that are present in the TL but opaque to learners at early to middle stages of the learning process” (p. 148). In discussing these strategies, Thomason is considering a more general language contact situation, in which these mechanisms lead to shift-induced interference in a bilingual or multilingual context. In other words, although she is not focusing specifically on the role of formal instruction, Thomason’s discussion sheds light on one of the basic points that will be dealt with in the present paper, which is the fact that these strategies should not be viewed simply as errors; rather they are an important part of the language learning process. A considerable number of scholars in the field of SLA view the strategies presented above as a result of the cognitive processing L2 learners go through in order to make sense of the language they are learning, including the usage of lexical items – borrowing – as well as structural features from the native language to the target language. One way to categorize this kind of interference is to conceptualize it as a feature of the learners’ interlanguage or their developing second language knowledge (Gass & Selinker 2008; Lightbown & Spada 2006). Gass and Selinker define interlanguage as “the language produced by a nonnative speaker of a language (i.e. a learner’s output). [It] refers to the systematic knowledge underlying learners’ production” (p. 518-9). Adding to this definition, Lightbown and Spada point out that GRAMMATICAL GENDER 5 “interlanguages have been found to be systematic, but they are also dynamic, continually evolving as learners receive more input and revise their hypotheses about the second language” (p. 80). Taking the concept of interlanguage as a starting point, the strategies learners use to make sense of their second or additional language —e.g. negotiation, the gap-filling approach, transfer, and avoidance— can be described as features of learners’ interlanguage in the sense that they are an essential part of how second-language acquisition takes place. Moreover, these strategies are also analyzed in relation to the role of the native language in the process of second-language acquisition. Within this view, learners’ errors are sometimes referred to as developmental errors because of their similarities with the developmental stages that characterize first-language acquisition. Lightbown and Spada discuss at least four types of developmental errors: Overgeneralization – application of a certain grammatical rule in contexts where the rule does not apply; Simplification – “where elements of a sentence are left out or where all verbs have the same form regardless of person, number, or tense” (p. 81); Transfer or interference – the use of structural elements of the native language into the second language, and; avoidance – when learners “avoid using features of language that they perceive to be difficult for them” (p. 82). The term ‘cross-linguistic influence’ was introduced in mid-1980s in the field of SLA as a more neutral term to account for all these types of possible influences on the target language. For De Angelis (2007, p. 19), “the study of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) seeks to explain how and under what conditions prior linguistic knowledge influences the production, comprehension and development of a target language.” This concept is very useful to the present study because it can be linked to the idea of interlanguage to describe learners’ strategies or attempts to make sense of a target language. In this sense, my standpoint is aligned with that of S. Pit Corder GRAMMATICAL GENDER 6 (1992, p. 20), who argues that “acquiring a language is a creative process in which learners are interacting with their environment to produce an internalized representation of the regularities they discover in the linguistic data to which they are exposed.” In the process of second or third language acquisition, grammar, especially morphology, constitutes one of the most difficult linguistic features to be acquired by a second-language learner (DeKeyser, 2005). However, the level of structural proximity between L1 and L2 represents a significant factor in how learners’ make sense of the morphological system of the second language. According to DeKeyser, at least three factors are involved in determining grammatical difficulty in L2 acquisition: Problem of meaning, problem of form, and problem of the form-meaning relationship. DeKeyser describes the problem of meaning by saying that “regardless of the form used to express a meaning, the meaning itself can constitute a source of difficulty, because of novelty, abstractness, or a combination of both” (p. 5). Generally, if the learner’s L1 lacks elements such as articles, classifiers, grammatical gender, and verbal aspect, or uses them in a different way, they will be hard to acquire due to the degree of abstraction they express. The problem of form is normally bigger in richly inflected languages, which have a number of morphological (morphemes or allomorphs) options to express a certain meaning. Finally, the form-meaning relationship is an issue when there is no transparency between form and meaning. DeKeyser argues
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