The placement of clitic personal pronouns in PFL: analysis of written productions of Spanish-speaking learners.

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to describe the behaviour of Spanish-speaking learners of European Portuguese as a foreign language with regard to the placement of clitic personal pronouns in uninduced written productions. Using the descriptions of Duarte (2003) and Martins (2013) for contemporary European Portuguese (CEP) and Fernández Soriano (1999) for peninsular Spanish, which are present in reference grammars, the research used a quantitative and qualitative methodology that combines Contrastive Analysis (Lado, 1957), Error Analysis (Corder, 1971) and Interlanguage theory (Selinker, 1972) in order to obtain as complete a picture as possible of the choices made by these learners. The results indicate that, given the collocational patterns of CEP, these learners produce more convergent than divergent occurrences. There is no linear correlation between convergent occurrences and proficiency level in the corpus analysed. Convergence is more evident in contexts of enclisis and divergence occurs mainly because learners opt for enclisis in contexts where proclisis would be necessary, with the context of relative subordinate clauses in particular proving problematic. The causes of the deviations found are essentially due to the overgeneralisation of the basic CEP collocational pattern, enclisis, and the interference of the learners' mother tongue.