Heritage Speakers’ Judgment of Non-Nominative Subjects: Spanish
gustar
Viola Miglio and Omar Miranda Flores1
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of California, Santa Barbara
1. Approaching the Topic
In the present study, we analysed heritage speakers’ understanding of the gustar
construction through grammaticality judgments. Gustar, ‘to like’, is a verb that builds a
so-called reverse construction, i.e. where the semantic subject (an experiencer) is cast in
the dative and not the nominative, much as the English verb to please is constructed with
its experiencer as an oblique argument, but the verb agrees with the grammatical subject
(the stimulus) – in it pleases me, ‘it’ is the stimulus/grammatical subject and ‘me’ the
experiencer/oblique argument.
The verb gustar is introduced early in Spanish as L2 textbooks, just as an
example, a hefty (500+ page) junior high and high school textbook such as ¡Avancemos!
(Garlin et al., 2007) introduces it already on page 42 (as well as throughout the book).
Quite a few other verbs –some common and others less so- also work like gustar
(encantar ‘to like (a lot)’, fascinar ‘to fascinate’, interesar ‘to interest’, molestar ‘to
bother’ etc.), and yet the construction is hardly mentioned in Spanish textbooks for
heritage speakers (see below). We deduced that the assumption underlying the silence of
heritage speaker Spanish textbooks on the construction rested on the premise that such a
construction, being rather common, would not create problems to heritage speakers (HS).
We, therefore, set out to assess how proficient heritage speakers were in recognizing
different conformations of the construction compared to non-native speakers learning
Spanish as L2.
We tested non-native speakers and heritage speakers studying Spanish at
university level in the use of gustar, and the results we obtained clearly show that HS are
different both from students learning Spanish as a second language (L2) and from native
speaker controls (for similar conclusions see Sorace 2003, Montrul 2010). In our study, in
fact, we did not find a statistically significant difference between the linguistic behaviour
of HS and non-native speakers (NNS) across the board.
Once we teased apart some of the results according to the syntactic structure of
the sentence, different generalizations started to appear. For instance, if the grammatical
subject preceded the verb, as in la política no nos gusta (‘we don’t like politics’), HS did
significantly worse than NNS in judging that the sentence was correct (p = .02). Native
speaker controls score 100% correct on these sentences.
1
Dr. Viola Miglio is Associate Professor in the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, at UCSB and
Omar Miranda is a Ph.D. candidate in the same Department. Correspondence should be addressed
to V. Miglio, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA 93106. E-mail:
[email protected].
However, a study carried out by Vázquez-Rozas (2006, 97) on a corpus of native
Spanish based on the ADESSE database2 also reflects the trends that HS show in regard
to gustar. We will conclude, therefore, that while HS do not behave like fully-fledged
native speakers with regard to reverse structures, represented in this study by gustar, they
clearly have a sensitivity to what ‘sounds right’, in the sense that they respond to
anomalies reflected by the frequency of the form’s usage in natural language.
2. The Need to Focus Specifically on Heritage Speakers
Given the number of Spanish HS in the U.S.A., and specifically in California, it is not
surprising that researchers in education and linguists are showing increasing interest in
the populations of bilingual students of Hispanic origin. According to the 2000 U.S.
Census, in fact, the Hispanic population in the US is 12.5% (35.3 millions, Carreira and
Geoffrion-Vinci, 2008). This number if compared to the 1990 census shows that the
population of Hispanic origin has more than doubled in 10 years (Rodríguez Pino, 1997).
As is to be expected, in some states the number of Latinos is considerably higher
than in others. California tops the chart with almost 11 million people of Hispanic origin,
which means a staggering 32.4% of the population of the state. In a public university of
the UC system, such as Santa Barbara (UCSB), approximate percentages provided by the
administration suggest that about 19% of the campus population is Hispanic, as well as
65% of majors in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (of about 350 students
majoring in Spanish).
These numbers are definitely significant when we consider that in the Department
of Spanish and Portuguese only has at present a single track for Spanish majors, geared
towards the study of the literature and culture of the Spanish-speaking world, including
some linguistics courses. Thus, UCSB falls into that 75% of post-secondary schools that
do not offer a separate series of courses for HS (Valdés, 1995). In fact, UCSB does not
have a separate track for students who have spoken Spanish at home from childhood and
are in this sense bilingual.
As Rodríguez Pino points out (1997), there are different characteristics that can
apply to HS. They can be 1) third- or fourth-generation U.S.-born Hispanic students who
have limited speaking skills in Spanish and for whom English is the dominant language;
2) first- and second-generation bilinguals displaying very different degrees of fluency in
either language; 3) immigrant students whose dominant language is Spanish. The
students attending UCSB, and specifically those that took part in this study belong
predominantly to the second group, but even within this group, individuals display very
different mastery of Spanish.
These students are, however, the majority of our majors and many of them are
typically fluent in orally (mostly colloquial) conversation, but their written Spanish and
their academic Spanish overall needs improvement. For this purpose we have two onequarter courses specifically tailored towards the needs of HS, but the courses are not
necessarily taken as a series, students can and do typically take either one or the other. In
2
http://adesse.uvigo.es/, which in turn uses the Arthus corpus of the University of Santiago de
Compostela and comprises ca. 1.5 million words, http://www.bds.usc.es/corpus.html.
the last two years of a 4-year degree, i.e. at the upper division level, heritage speakers
join the non-native speakers in the same content courses.
Some lecturers of Spanish at UCSB brought to our attention HS tendency to make
agreement mistakes with verbs of the gustar-type (such as encantar ‘to charm’, doler ‘to
hurt’, interesar ‘to interest’ etc. henceforth gustar-type verbs - see the extensive
treatment in Belletti and Rizzi, 1988).
Other language practitioners, and many textbooks maintain that HS have no
problem with this type of verb, for instance the textbooks used at UCSB (Curland, Davis,
Lomelí, 2005; Carreira and Geoffrion-Vinci 2008). A third one (Marqués 2004, 363)
devotes half a page to the subject, with a list of the gustar-type verbs whose argument
structure differs from English to Spanish, as well as giving the students one exercise to
practice this kind of verb by freely creating sentences based on the model:
1. (yo) cansar/ejercicios ‘(I) tire (out)/exercises’-> Me cansan los ejercicios,
‘the exercises tire me’.
The trend may be changing, if we take two books, El mundo 21 hispano
(Samaniego, Rojas, Ohara and Alarcón 2005) and ¡De una vez! (Samaniego, Rodríguez
and Rojas 2008). These have similar sections on the gustar-type verb. They first elicit a
grammaticality judgment from the student, making them compare pairs of ungrammatical
and grammatical sentences:
3. a. ¿Tú gusta la comida mexicana?
b. ¿Te gusta la comida mexicana?
4. a. Me fascina la comida mexicana
b. Yo fascina la comida mexicana
Then they explain the grammatical structure of these sentences (IO + V + Subject) and
make a clear distinction with Eng. to like. They also mention the emphatic form with
clitic doubling:
5. A mi hermano no le gustaron las enchiladas potosinas
‘My brother did not like the enchiladas from San Luis Potosí’
(Samaniego et al. 2005, 174).
They end the 3-page section with other verbs following the same pattern and with four
exercises.
A section like this is a little more than no mention at all, but it should be
considered in the light of a more comprehensive question, i.e. whether the HS population
requires addressing their grammatical problems separately and with a different approach
from L2 students’. The need to address HS specific needs vis a vis Spanish as L2 students
was recognized as early as the 1970s by Valdés (1975), and has picked up in the last
decade (see the many contributions by linguists, especially S. Montrul, and J. Toribio
among others). We feel, however, that there is still a need for a detailed study of the
problem areas in HS Spanish. Our study addresses one such area revealing it to be a
problem area for HS, and we hope that this will encourage applied linguists and other
practitioners to consider it in their materials and courses of Spanish for HS.
3. Gustar-type Constructions
A verb such as gustar ‘to like’ is one of a series of verbs of emotions (often called psych
verbs in linguistics, Belletti and Rizzi, 1988) that have a ‘semantic subject’, commonly
referred to as an experiencer (rather than an agent, as in Mary kissed John). This
argument is cast in the oblique case (the dative, although the accusative is also a
possibility), whereas the stimulus of the verb (or theme) is the actual nominative subject,
requiring person and number agreement with the verb. The construction of gustar,
therefore differs from ‘to like’, as this latter has a canonical transitive construction in
English:
6.
(semantic level)
(syntactic level)
Mary
experiencer
subj. (NOM.)
likes
verb
verb
cats
stimulus
obj. (ACC.)
-> verb agrees with experiencer
Whereas in Spanish, the experiencer is cast as an indirect object (IO), and the stimulus as
a syntactic subject, with which the verb agrees in number:
7.
(semantic level)
(syntactic level)
A María
experiencer
IO (DAT.)
le
IO-RED
gustan
verb
verb
los gatos
stimulus
subj. (NOM.)
-> verb agrees with stimulus
It should be mentioned, however, that not all equivalent English psych verbs behave as to
like. In fact, to interest, to bother, to fascinate – to mention but a few equivalents of
common Spanish reverse construction verbs, behave like their Spanish equivalents in
terms of the semantic functions of their arguments:
8. a. Ancient civilizations (pl.) fascinate (pl.)
stimulus
verb
b. Ancient Rome (sg.)
stimulus
fascinates (sg.)
verb
him (sg.)
experiencer
them (pl.)
experiencer
-> verb agrees with stimulus
However, there is no difference in the syntactic structure of to like and to fascinate in
English. The verb in either case agrees with the grammatical subject of the sentence:
9. a. Mary
b. Ancient Rome
subj. (sg.)
likes
fascinates
verb (sg.)
cats
them
obj. (pl.)
In general terms, the Spanish of HS is likely to be impacted through transfer from
English, the dominant language for many HS that are educated entirely in the majority
language (Toribio and Nye, 2006)
One could hypothesize, therefore, that a direct construction such as is found in
English for to like could affect the Spanish reverse construction gustar either because of
the high frequency of this verb, or because transfer is more likely to affect syntactic
structure than semantic characteristics of verbal arguments, or both (but see Montrul,
1998 for a third reason below).
3.1 Structure
According to Belletti and Rizzi (1988) and Whitley (1995) piacere/gustar-type verb
arguments originate inside the verb phrase (VP); the stimulus (also called the ‘theme’, it
is the ‘cause’ of the feeling in the so-called psych verbs) is then moved into the subject
position as a derived subject by transformation. The experiencer is generated as an
indirect object and marked with dative case.
Contrary to the agentive type of verb, where the theta grid reports a
straightforward mapping of the semantic roles directly to the structural position of the
verb’s arguments (for instance to hit or golpear [agent, theme], where agent maps to the
subject and the theme to the object), the gustar-type of verb displays an experiencer and a
stimulus (or theme), but contrarily to what would be expected from a typical Thematic
Hierarchy such as in Belletti and Rizzi (1988) Agent > Experiencer > Theme3, the
argument that maps to the syntactic subject is the stimulus, which displays in fact
agreement with the verb, but typically appears after the verb, whereas the experiencer
appears before the verb, but lacks the agreement of a real subject.
We are mainly concerned with recognition of grammaticality in this study, and
not with the structure of the construction per se. We therefore accept the analysis of the
structure found in Belletti and Rizzi (1988, 293) for the gustar-type verbs of Italian (they
have in fact piacere, the equivalent of Sp. gustar, in the diagram below, figure 10.),
where at the deep structure (DS) level both stimulus (questo) and experiencer (Gianni)
are located as objects of the verb, and as such inside the VP4. A verb like gustar is
analyzed as taking two objects a direct object (DO) and an indirect object (IO), just like
ditransitive verbs of the give-type (or Sp. dar).
The fact that the mapping of thematic roles differs from the arguments’ syntactic
structure (see example 7. above), prompts Montrul (1998) to maintain that these verb
cause learnability issues at least in L2. This could be a third reason that causes HS to
3
Fillmore (1968) first suggested Agent > Instrument > Object.
Vázquez-Rozas (2006, 81) reaches the same conclusion about the structure of GTVs (gustartype verbs) from a functional perspective, and maintains that the IOs of such verbs should be
considered as part of their core argument structure.
4
restructure the reverse construction in gustar and regularize it to a direct construction
such as the English to like. A more detailed look at Belletti and Rizzi’s analysis will
allow us to explain why we tested different positions for the verb’s arguments in our
experiment.
10. Belletti & Rizzi’s schema for John likes this – and literal translation into Sp. and Eng.
Belletti and Rizzi’s seminal paper analyses three types of psych-verbs in Italian,
on the one hand the temere-type (‘to fear’, their type 1, as in Gianni teme questo, ‘John
fears this’), which maps onto a straightforward argumental structure where the
experiencer is realized as a nominative subject and the theme is the object of the verb,
and on the other hand the preoccupare-type (‘to worry’, their type 2, as in Questo
proccupa Gianni, ‘This worries John’), where the argumental roles are reversed, that is
the experiencer is the object of the verb and the theme the subject, and the piacere-type
(‘to like’, type 3, or gustar in Spanish). This last type allows the moving about of the
experiencer, cast as an IO, so that both A Gianni piace questo and Questo piace a Gianni
are perfectly normal permutations translating into ‘John likes this’. In Italian,
permutations of the positions of experiencer and theme are only possible in this third type
of psych-verb, and ungrammatical in the other two types (this is not true of Spanish, see
below). The ungrammaticality is not exclusive of psych verbs, but also of regular
transitive verbs, where in Italian, English, and Spanish a sentence such as she kisses John
does not allow any swapping of arguments from subject to object position and vice-versa.
This is completely ungrammatical in English (*JohnDO kisses sheSUBJ), as well as in
Spanish or Italian, unless it bears contrastive focus (of the Bagels, I like - type), and even
then it is marginal or ungrammatical without clitic doubling (It. ?GiovanniDO vedo ioSUBJ,
?GiovanniDO loDO vedo ioSUBJ; Sp. *A JuanDO veo yoSUBJ,, A JuanDO loDO veo yoSUBJ),
presumably because of case assignment restrictions. Belletti and Rizzi argue (following a
‘step in the right direction’ begun by Fillmore 1968, and Postal 1970, Belletti and Rizzi
1988, 292) that an agentive construction (valid both for verbs such as to kiss and psych
verbs such as to fear) has the following structure:
11. Typical agentive structure
Only in this second construction do DS and surface structure (SS) coincide in
theta role assignment and structural positioning of arguments, for the temere-type and
piacere-type of psych verbs, there is no external argument and the subject position is
filled after movement (as in 10.). This captures the generalization that different types of
psych verbs do not cast the same thematic role idiosyncratically either as subject or
object: in Sp. Esto preocupa a Juan, It. Questo preoccupa Gianni, ‘This worries John’,
this is the stimulus and syntactic subject, as well as in the gustar-type verbs, cf. Sp. A las
niñas les gusta esto/Alle bambine piace questo, ‘The girls like this’, where this is the
stimulus and syntactic subject and as such shows agreement with the verb; Gianni/Juan is
the experiencer and is cast either as DO (preocupar-type) or IO (gustar-type). The
stimulus could also be cast as an object, though: Sp. Juan teme las enfermedades ‘Juan
fears illnesses’, where the theme is an object and the experiencer a subject.
Belletti and Rizzi (ibid.) offer a number of proofs within a Government and
Binding approach to argue that subjects of verbs like preoccupare and piacere are
derived subjects and that we never see the DS position of arguments for these types of
psych verbs on the surface. However, theta-roles such as agent, patient, experiencer, and
theme (or stimulus) play an important role at the interface between the syntactic and
semantic component of grammar, while being irrelevant within the syntactic module
proper (ibid 1988, 295).
In the gustar-type verb the dative-marked experiencer can be placed before or
after the verb, something that cannot be done in Italian with the DO of verbs like
preoccupare. Dative in gustar-type verbs is assigned inherently by means of an
appropriate preposition governing the NP. Once the preposition is assigned, it moves with
the NP and allows that NP to be properly case-marked either pre- or post-verbally. This
according to Belletti and Rizzi explains the fact that the experiencer in preoccupare-type
verb cannot occur pre-verbally under contextually normal conditions: that experiencer is
a DO and needs to remain in a VP internal position in order to be case-marked.
Finally, a propos of the position of the dative marked experiencer when it appears
pre-verbally, Belletti and Rizzi argue convincingly that of the two positions it could
occupy, the topic or subject position, the dative-marked experiencer is most likely
occupying the subject position (1988, 337). We assume that this is true for Spanish also.
4. Methodology
Given these differences in treatment and in impressionistic data, we decided to run a
series of informal pilot studies based on written questionnaires requesting grammaticality
judgments on a series of different gustar-type verbs and we found that HS did indeed
score differently from monolingual Spanish speakers (who typically scored 100% on the
same tests).
The tendency we found in these preliminary studies was that if the experiencer (in
the dative) preceded the verb such as in:
12.
Me
gustan
I (DAT)
like
‘I like sports’
los deportes
the sports
HS would score significantly better than non-native students of Spanish, but if the order
was reversed, i.e. the nominative subject preceding the verb – which is also grammatical,
such as in:
13.
Los deportes me
The sports
I (DAT)
gustan ‘I like sports’/ ‘sports, I like’
like
at times the non-native speakers would score better than the HS, a surprising result for a
structure that not all textbooks for heritage speakers mention.
There are, however, many variables in these constructions (location of arguments
with respect to verb, possibility of reduplication of the experiencer with a stressed
pronoun, full noun phrases vs. pronouns, etc.). To make sense of the data and to be able
to exclude any possibility of error due to lack of familiarity with a specific verb or
because of the structure of English cognates, we eventually limited the main experiment
to the use of the most common of these types of verb, i.e. to gustar only.
The students voluntarily accepted to participate in the test consisting of a
questionnaire requesting some information about the informants’ linguistic background
(see Appendix I for the actual questionnaire5), and of a section eliciting grammaticality
5
We were able to reach the conclusions in this study despite some obvious flaws in the
construction of the questionnaire. The experiment was improved and repeated a year later
judgments (‘ok’/ ‘no’) for 24 sentences displaying correct and incorrect subject-verb
agreement.
The participants in the study were university students with upper division
standing (taking courses in the last two years of a 4-year degree) of Hispanic origin (98
HS) and non-Hispanic, American English native speakers (51 non-native speakers of
Spanish, NNS) with advanced command of Spanish6. All participants took the test at the
same time and under the same type of conditions (classroom setting). To monitor the
possible distinction between the main groups we also tested 5 monolingual native
speakers of Spanish (5 controls).
We applied a 2-proportion Z Test to establish the statistical significance between
two unequal populations such as the HS and the non-native speakers participating in the
study7.
The 24 sentences with gustar varied according to the position of the arguments of
the verb, the presence of an emphatic stressed pronoun duplicating the experiencer, as
well as their being grammatically correct or incorrect. Some of the sentences were as
follows (for the complete list, see Appendix I, emph = emphatic):
14.
a-
*No me
Not I (DAT)
‘I don’t like sports’
gusta los deportes
like
the sports
b-
Nos
gustan
We (DAT)
like
‘We like adventure films’
c-
A mí
no
me
I (DAT-emph) not
I (DAT)
‘I don’t like classical music’
d-
Las películas de horror
The films of horror
‘I don’t like horror films’
e-
*Los deportes extremos
me
The sports extreme
I (DAT)
‘I (myself) like extreme sports’
las películas de aventuras
the films of adventure
gusta la música clásica
like
the music classical
no me
not I (DAT)
gustan
like
gusta a mí
like
I (DAT-emph)
correcting many of the previous problems (lack of fillers, non-randomised stimuli, appropriate
statistical testing etc., see Miglio and Gries, in progress).
6
Participants’ command of Spanish was not tested separately, but we implicitly attributed to
them an approximately even level of Spanish thanks to their upper division standing – these
students are proficient enough to be able to attend all lectures taught in academic Spanish, and
must write essays and exams also entirely in Spanish.
7
We are grateful to Brian Frazier for his help with statistics, all decisions and possible remaining
errors are of course our own.
5. Results
Unlike the pilots we ran before the study, in the study proper we did not find a
statistically significant difference between the linguistic behavior of HS and non-native
speakers (NNS) across all questions. NNS averaged a total of 80% correct answers (that
is, they were able to discriminate correctly as to which sentences were correct and which
were incorrect 80% of the time), while HS answered correctly 84%, which did not yield a
significant difference between the two populations (p = .62).
Once we teased apart some of the results according to syntactic structure of the
sentence, different generalizations started to appear. For instance, when the sentence is
correct (i.e. there are no agreement mistakes in it), and the grammatical subject precedes
Subject Position / Correctness
100
93
90
80
90
76
60
60
%
93
78
76
70
89
50
NNS
HS
40
30
20
10
0
T1
T2
T3
T4
Sentence types
Figure 15. HS and NNS (AES) performance distinguishing syntactic structure of the
sentence and its correctness. T1 = SV&Correct, T2 = SV&Incorrect, T3 = VS&Correct,
T4 = VS&Incorrect.
the verb, i.e. the subjects were asked to judge a sentence of the type La política no nos
gusta (‘we don’t like politics’), HS did significantly worse than NNS in judging that the
sentence was correct (p = .02). This type of sentence is labeled ‘type 1’, which displays
the grammatical subject before the verb (and is less common in usage than the one with
the grammatical subject after the verb, i.e. type 3) in the graph, and its results deviate
from other types. For instance, type 2 in Fig. 15 is a sentence that displays the
grammatical subject before the verb, but the sentence is incorrect, such as in *Las arañas
no me gusta ‘I don’t like spiders’ (with wrong agreement). In this case, HS did
significantly better than NNS (p = .005)8.
Type 3 sentences are correct sentences with the experiencer before the verb: A
nosostros nos gusta la comida italiana ‘We like Italian food’, we couldn’t prove that
there was any significant difference between the two groups (p = .34), so that in the case
of the most unmarked way of stating ‘someone likes something’ both HS and NNS do
equally well, but still significantly differently from native speakers.
Finally, when the sentence is of type 4, i.e. experiencer before the verb and the
sentence is incorrect, as is the case in, for instance, *A mí me gusta los chocolates ‘I like
chocolates’, HS do significantly better than NNS (p = .008) in recognizing that those
sentences are actually incorrect.
From previous pilot studies (cf. the graph in Fig. 16), we had noticed that HS do
worse when the grammatical subject is before the verb, and this is borne out by the data
above, possibly even by type 2 sentences: given that HS tend to judge this type of
sentence as wrong, the high score in type 2 sentences (which all had ungrammatical
agreement) may actually not be due to their finding fault with agreement per se, but with
the sentence type because of its information structure.
90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Non-­‐Heritage Speakers Heritage Speakers #9 (Sema-­‐
Gramm) #11 (Sema-­‐ #14 (Gramm-­‐ #20 (Gramm-­‐
Gramm) Sema) Sema) Figure 16. – When the semantic subject (‘Sema’ – the experiencer) precedes the
grammatical subject (‘Gramm’), HS did worse than NHS in our pilot studies (these are
raw numbers, not percentages).
We also tested whether HS and NNS would react differently to the doubling of the
experiencer by means of a stressed pronoun, which in Spanish, as a clitic-doubling
8
It is of course a possibility that in this case, HS are not reacting to the agreement problem, but
continue to react to the position of the preverbal syntactic subject, just as in type 1, only doing
better than NNS because the agreement discrepancy of these sentences makes the sentence
ungrammatical (see Miglio and Gries, in progress).
language, is a grammatically correct way to emphasize the experiencer. In order to test
these structures we gave the subjects sentences such as the following ones. Type 5
displayed the grammatical subject and an unstressed IO pronoun representing the
experiencer before the verb, with a stressed pronoun duplicating the IO after the verb: El
olor a bosque nos gusta a nosotros ‘We like the smell of the woods’. In this type of
sentence NNS did better than HS in judging the sentences correctly (75% vs. 70%, see
Fig. 17) and the difference between the two groups is significant (NNS≠HS p = .001).
The trend is reversed once the emphatic pronoun, as well as the regular unstressed
pronoun representing the experiencer are before the verb and the grammatical subject is
after the verb: this is a type 6 sentence, i.e. A mí no me gusta la música clásica ‘As for
me, I don’t like classical music’. In this case HS do significantly better than NNS (p =
.02).
Emphatic doubling of IO
100
90
90
80
70
75
70
78
86
94
82 82
60
%
50
NNS
HS
40
30
20
10
0
T5
T6
T7
T8
Type of sentence
Fig. 17. – Emphatic doubling of IO pronoun. T5 = SVPron, T6 = PronVS,
T7 = VS, T8 = SV.
Type 7 and 8 are non-emphatic sentences where the experiencer is expressed by an
unstressed pronoun. In type 7 the grammatical subject, underlined in the sentence, is after
the verb (No me gustan los ejercicios aeróbicos ‘I don’t like aerobics’), whereas the order
is reversed in type 8 (Los postres franceses nos gustan ‘we like French desserts’).
Comparison of both groups’ performance with regards to types 7 and 8 sentences yielded
non-significantly different results, i.e. HS performed as well as the NNS, although
percentage-wise HS scored better than NNS on type 7 (94% vs. 86%), but not on type 8.
T7 and T8 sentences show non-significant results (p=.59 and p=.9 respectively), whereas
both group score equally well on T5, and HS do better than NNS on T6 (p=.02).
In general, in the sentences with the emphatic doubling of the pronoun, regardless
of where the grammatical subject is located, NNS perform similarly to HS, whereas HS
seem to respond once again to the location of the arguments in the sentence, if the
grammatical subject is before the verb they score similarly to NNS (type 5 and type 8)
regardless of the presence or absence of the emphatic reduplication. If the grammatical
subject is after the verb as in types 6 and 7, HS do better, in fact, than NNS, even if for
type 7 the difference is not significant.
We also looked at sentences whose experiencer and grammatical subject
disagreed in number (experiencer singular and subject plural or vice versa) essentially to
see whether the informants would try and make the verb agree with the experiencer rather
than the actual grammatical subject. This was done in order to corroborate the view that
agreement problems could reveal the existence of transfer from the L1, as found in a
short paper by Dvorak and Kirschner (1982) on bilingual subjects from New York of
Puerto Rican origin. In that case, the experiment was quite different: 13 subjects were
tested by means of a translation task consisting of 50 sentences, and results are therefore
not easily comparable. However, the interesting results were that subjects seldom made
agreement mistakes with 1st and 2nd person experiencers9, but when the experiencer was
3rd person and there was a discrepancy between singular experiencer (the IO) and plural
theme (i.e. syntactic subject) or vice-versa, subjects tended to make the verb agree with
the experiencer, rather than with the syntactic subject as required by grammar.
In our study, we had sentences such as:
18. Type 9 - No me gustan los ejercicios aeróbicos
‘I don’t like aerobics’
where the subject is plural and the experiencer is singular. In the next type, type 10, the
subject is singular and the experiencer is plural:
19. Type 10 - No nos gusta el fútbol
‘We don’t like football’
In Type 11, the subject precedes the verb and there is a discrepancy between the number
of the subject and the experiencer:
20. Type 11 - La política no nos gusta
‘We don’t like politics’
In Type 12, the subject precedes the verb and there is a discrepancy between the
agreement on the verb and the experiencer. This is not the same as the preceding group,
9
It is unclear, in Dvorak and Kirschner (1982) if ‘1st and 2nd persons’ are just intended to be 1st
and 2nd singular, as they state, since among the pronouns they tested they include ‘me, nos, te’
[my emphasis] (1982, 61). We had both singular and plural in our sentences, but perhaps not
enough instances of third persons exclusively to compare with their results. We therefore
compared sg./pl. discrepancy across all persons.
although there is some overlap, since there could be sentences where agreement is
incorrectly coded on the verb:
21. Type 12 - Las películas de horror no me gustan
‘I don’t like horror films’
and this sentence would have also been counted in the preceding group, but there are also
sentences such as *El mar me gustan mucho ‘I like the sea very much’, where subject and
experiencer agree in number (so this would not have been counted in Type 11, but the
verb is plural -erroneously- and therefore does not agree with the experiencer which is
singular). Finally, Type 13 displays sentences where there is no sg./pl. discrepancy.
22. Type 13 - A mí no me gusta la música clásica
‘I don’t like classical music’ (emphatic)
These results are charted in Fig. 23. They are, however, inconclusive, because none of
them is statistically significant.
Discrepancy sg/pl
90
80
76
82
8685
7877
76
70
8082
71
60
%
50
NNS
HS
40
30
20
10
0
T9
T 10
T 11
T 12
T 13
Type of sentence
Fig. 23. – Discrepancy singular/plural. T9 = S/pl-IO/sg, T10 = S/sg-IO/pl,
T11 = SV & S ≠ IO, T12 = SV & V ≠ IO, T13 = no discrepancy (total).
6. Discussion of results
The most interesting result of our study, we feel, is the fact that of all variables (negation,
discrepancy singular and plural, position of arguments with respect to the verb,
reinforcement of the experiencer with a stressed pronoun, or combinations thereof) HS
seem be most sensitive with regard to the position of arguments in sentences with gustar.
If we consider the results of an analysis of the Arthus corpus10 carried out by
Victoria Vázquez (2006, 97), we find the following results about construction frequency
(numbers refer to clauses):
Frequencies and % of
Pre- and postposition
of Subject & IO for
gustar-type verbs
Syntactic subject (theme)
IO (experiencer)
Preposed
125 (9.98%)
223 (18.26%)
Postposed
678 (54.15%)
29 (2.37%)
Implicit, clitic
449 (35.86%)
969 (79.36%)
Total
1252
1221
Table 24. – Argument Position in Actual Usage11
Clearly, as Vázquez Rozas concludes (2006, 84), gustar-type verbs prefer to
express their IO argument as clitic (78.66%), rather than with a full-form (8.77%), or
even with a full form reduplicated by a clitic (13.38%). In terms of information structure,
it could be construed that the syntactic subject is the important or new information to
communicate (or new information), since it tends to appear as expressed by a full form
(in the table 64% ca. as opposed to 36% of syntactic subjects expressed by a clitic). It is
moreover most commonly placed after the verb (ca. 54%), rather than before (about
10%). Vice versa, the experiencer is located most often preceding the verb (18%), rather
than following (2%) – since the experiencer is most often expressed by a clitic, it has
however an obligatory position with respect to the verb (ca. 79% of occurrences).
We can see that Vásquez-Rozas’s results seem to duplicate the trend that HS
show in regard to gustar. HS clearly have a sensitivity to what ‘sounds right’, in the sense
that they do respond to anomalies in sentences with gustar in the same way as to reflect
10
ARTHUS stands for Archivo de Textos Hispánicos de la Universidad de Santiago (de
Compostela). It is a corpus of Spanish syntactic data, the contemporary part of which comprises
approximately 1.5 million words from mostly written texts comprising different styles, about
300.000 words from oral texts. The syntactic analysis was carried out by Prof. G. Rojo’s team,
and the syntactic database is called BDS (Base de Datos Sintácticos). For further information and
access: http://www.bds.usc.es/.
11
The contents of this table reproduce Table 4.4 in Vázquez-Rozas’s paper (2006, 97).
these clear-cut patterns of frequency in natural language. Therefore what they seem to
find fault with in sentences such as T1 Las canciones románticas me gustan a mí ‘I
myself like romantic songs’ is possibly not a problem of agreement, but rather a problem
with the information structure of the sentence, which in this case has three handicaps
compared to common usage: the IO expressed by a full form, the placement of this form
after the verb, and the location of the syntactic subject before the verb, when common
usage has it occurring after the verb. Conversely, we would argue that, had T2 sentences
not been ungrammatical because of agreement mismatch (*Las arañas no me gusta, ‘I
don’t like spiders’), HS would have probably still considered them anomalous (and
therefore ungrammatical) because of the location of the syntactic subject. In fact, where
the canonical position of arguments is respected, such as in T4 sentences (*No me gusta
los deportes, ‘I don’t like sports’) they do significantly better than NNS in spotting
agreement problems (90% correct for HS vs. 76% for NNS, p = 0.4).
These results show that HS in some respects are more similar to native speakers,
since they have a sense of what is more frequently used in the language, but they are still
not quite comparable to native speakers’ performance in spotting subject-verb agreement
mistakes or accepting less usual, but perfectly grammatical argument configurations.
7. Conclusions
While this first study was carried out over a sizeable number of subjects (149 in total),
the number of sentences (24) is a rather small and therefore statistical tests applied to our
results may have a more limited validity because of that, however, the general conclusion
still holds that any structure that deviates from the most common pattern for gustar verbs
somehow confuses heritage speakers and causes them to make similar number of
mistakes as non-native speakers with an advanced level of Spanish proficiency.
This is perhaps not surprising, if on the one hand this study clearly shows that
with respect to structures involving gustar-type verbs HS command of Spanish is not
comparable with monolingual native speakers, while on the other hand they have some
aspects in common with L2 learners, and yet they show a sensitivity to common usage
patterns typical of native speakers. These are aspects that have been noticed by others
who work with HS (see for instance Carreira 2007 with Spanish HS, and Polinsky 2008
with Russian HS, who quite rightly defines HS as ‘the missing link’ between L1 and L2
proficiency in a given language).
At this point we would like to conclude by returning to the population that took
part in this study; the subjects were all upper division students (mostly majors and
minors) in a programme leading to a degree in Spanish language and literature. It could
be argued that our study is limited in scope, and that problems with unusual constructions
involving gustar are minor. We think however, that although limited in scope, the study
is symptomatic of a wider problem on two levels. First of all, if HS speakers are uncertain
of how to use gustar when cast in anomalous constructions from an information
structural point of view, they will very likely also have problems with all other psych
verbs, most of which are less familiar than gustar. This will limit their proficiency on a
practical level within their academic pursuits and the job market, and surely also impairs
their understanding and appreciation of creative language manipulated for literary
purposes.
Secondly, we should consider the long-term goals of a degree in Spanish, as well
as those of courses specifically tailored for HS, such as those proposed by Valdés (1997),
which include, for instance, language maintenance, the acquisition of a prestige variety of
Spanish, and the expansion of the students’ grammatical, textual, and pragmatic
competence in Spanish. The improvement of these skills is undoubtedly crucial for HS to
become fully competent bilinguals. Specifically, a study such as this one addresses both
the heritage speakers’ expansion of grammatical and textual competence, as well as the
acquisition of the standard, and therefore prestigious variety of Spanish, which does
allow many types of permutations in psych-verb experiencer position without resulting in
ungrammaticality.
Moreover, we know from Cummins (1979, 1981, 1984) and others (see Carreira
2007, 148-9, for further discussion and other references) that there is a difference
between what is known as BICS (basic interpersonal communicative skills) and CALP
(cognitive academic language proficiency). BICS are acquired within a period of two
years, whereas at least five years are needed to attain CALP. We believe that students
that have an undeniable linguistic advantage such as HS through their early and
continued exposure to Spanish should have attained this degree of academic language
proficiency by the end of their degree from our institution or equivalent ones. We do not
believe that a completely separate track is necessary for HS, but this study shows that HS
could certainly benefit from language courses specifically tailored to their needs and
these should be made available to them early in their high school or university career.
In this sense it is a sum of specific studies such this one that can help isolate
problem areas in HS language competence and make language practitioners aware of
them so that they may address such problematic points in their classes as well as their
textbooks.
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Appendix 1 - Questionnaire 12
Edad: __________ Sexo:
_______
________________________________
Lugar
de
nacimiento:
Lugar de nacimiento de su padre: ____________________
________________________
¿Ha vivido en los EEUU desde su nacimiento?
_________________________
¿Se habla español en su casa?
Sí
______________________________
Sí
No
No
¿En dónde?
¿Quién(es) lo habla(n)?
Si
tiene
hermanos,
¿qué
idioma
________________________________________
hablan
¿Tomó clases de español en la escuela secundaria?
__________________
Sí
¿Ha pasado algún tiempo en un país de habla hispana?
________________
…de su madre:
entre
No
Sí
ustedes?
¿Cuánto tiempo?
No ¿Cuánto tiempo?
¿Cuál(es)
país(es)?
_____________________________________________________________________
Clases de español tomadas en UCSB:
Clase
Trimestre (Quarter) / Año
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
______
Señale si la oración le parece correcta (OK) o incorrecta (NO).
12
1. A mí me gustan las matemáticas
OK
NO
2. No me gusta los deportes
OK
NO
Please see note #5, this questionnaire should not be used without fillers and randomization of
stimuli – see Miglio and Gries (in progress).
3. Las canciones románticas me gustan a mí
OK
NO
4. Las arañas no me gusta
OK
NO
5. A nosotros nos gusta la comida italiana
OK
NO
6. No nos gustan la basura tirada en la playa
OK
NO
7. El olor a bosque nos gusta a nosotros
OK
NO
8. El clima lluvioso no nos gustan
OK
NO
9. A mí no me gusta la música clásica
OK
NO
10. Me gustan mucho mi familia
OK
NO
11. La contaminación no me gusta a mí
OK
NO
12. El mar me gustan mucho
OK
NO
13. No nos gusta el futbol
OK
NO
14. A nosotros nos gustan el cine español
OK
NO
15. La política no nos gusta
OK
NO
16. El cine de acción nos gustan a nosotros
OK
NO
17. No me gustan los ejercicios aeróbicos
OK
NO
18. A mí me gusta los chocolates
OK
NO
19. Las películas de horror no me gustan
OK
NO
20. Los deportes extremos me gusta a mí
OK
NO
21. Nos gustan las películas de aventuras
OK
NO
22. A nosotros no nos gusta las clases de idiomas
OK
NO
23. Los postres franceses nos gustan
OK
NO
24. Las clases aburridas no nos gusta a nosotros
OK
NO