The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

This study examines the variable occurrence of preposition duplication in contexts of coordination in Spanish (e.g., "Fui con mi madre y (con) mi padre"). We build on previous research on this variable morphosyntactic phenomenon (namely, prepositions in contexts of coordination) by expanding the type of data and the independent variables…

In this paper we examine the use of Guarani affixes and clitics in colloquial Paraguayan Spanish. We depart from the traditional view of these as "borrowings," and instead explore the idea that these phenomena can be integrated within Muysken's (2000, 2013, 2014) typology of code-mixing. We claim that most of these uses may stem from a…

Complements of causative predicates such as "hacer" in Spanish present a problem for analyses of mood that are based on semantic or pragmatic notions of assertion. The problem results from the fact that information expressed by these complements is presented both as true and new, and yet the complement verb appears in the subjunctive…

This current study reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the place of the "voseo" in the Spanish language curriculum in the United States. The study describes the results of questionnaire responses from 177 US Spanish teachers and survey responses from 560 US college students of Spanish. Both instruments sought…

Isleno Spanish speakers maintain few contexts firmly in the subjunctive (for example, adverbial clauses with the conjunctions "para que" and "antes que" and nominal clauses with "querer"), with most other semantic or syntactic categories optionally licensing the subjunctive. This study will outline the obligatory and optional uses of present and…

The present study investigates whether the implementation of a dictogloss task within a proactive Focus on Form approach (e.g., Long 1991; Long and Robinson 1998) has significant effects on the acquisition of Spanish present subjunctive. A total of sixty-six learners in a fifth-semester Spanish course participated in the study and were assigned to…

The purpose of this paper is to compare structured input (SI) with other input-based instructional treatments. The input-based instructional types include: input flood (IF), text enhancement (TE), SI activities, and focused input (FI; SI without implicit negative feedback). Participants included 145 adult learners enrolled in an intermediate…

This study examines the effects of processing instruction (PI) alone versus PI and output (O) on the acquisition of three conjunctional and infinitival phrases in Spanish. Seventy intermediate and advanced-intermediate high school participants received: 1) PI on three consecutive days (PI + PI + PI); 2) PI for two days and meaning-based output…

In the present study, we examine the roles of 1) explicit information about language provided to learners prior to treatment and 2) aptitude (specifically grammatical sensitivity) within Processing Instruction. Forty-two learners of Spanish in their third-semester of study were divided into two groups: those who received explicit information (EI)…

The study examined heritage speaker grammars and to what extent they diverge with respect to grammatical gender from adult L2 learners. Results from a preference task involving code-mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) and code-mixed copula constructions show a difference between these two types of operations. Heritage speakers patterned with the…

This article attempts to highlight the importance of theoretical linguistics and empirical cognitive linguistics studies for the practical teaching of Spanish as a second language. Looking at the domain of subject pronominal use as an example, I endeavor to show how formal linguistics can be useful to language instructors. This is a significant…

The present investigation examines possible social and linguistic factors that influence forms of address used in Chilean Spanish with various interlocutors. A characteristic of the Spanish of Chile is the use of a variety of forms of address for the second person singular, "tu", "vos", and "usted", with corresponding…

Traces the evolution of the Spanish prepositions from the original Latin declensions. (DS)