Estudo da expressão de eventos de transferência de posse na interlíngua de brasileiros aprendizes de inglês

Abstract

Based on Construction Grammar theory (GOLDBERG, 1995, 2006) and on the Interlanguage Hypothesis (SELINKER, 1972), the present study has sought to investigate the acquisition of the English Ditransitive Construction by 62 native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, grouped according to their proficiency level (beginner, intermediate and advanced) in the English language. The influence of Portuguese on the mental representations these speakers form concerning other ways ofexpressing transfer of possession in the target language has also been investigated. A control group of 20 native speakers of English has been used to compare the learners behavior to the expected behavior of native speakers in the target language. In order to reach our goals, an acceptability judgment task was designed in which subjects wereasked to rate the acceptability of sentences such as: John told Mark a story, John told a story to Mark, *John told to Mark a story, and *Mary me gave a book. Both the frequency of the judgments (from 1 completely unacceptable to 5 completely acceptable) and the comparison established between the learners and the native speakers behaviors were considered during data analysis for each sentence in the fourgroups. In addition, Fisher`s Exact Test has been used to determine whether the data found bore any statistical significance. Results have shown that the ditransitive construction is likely to become part of the interlanguage of Brazilian learners of English only at the advanced level of proficiency. Subjects at this level have shown to widely accept the construction both with real and fake verbs. It has also been found thatthe categorization of the verbs that can appear in the ditransitive construction is very similar between Brazilian advanced learners and native speakers of English. Moreover, a comparison of the judgments given by the experimental groups suggests that Brazilian learners, especially beginners and intermediates, may have been influenced by their representation of how transfer of possession is expressed in their native language. At the same time, however, these subjects have shown to be sensitive to the L2 input, in that they tend to reject structures that are possible in their L1, but not in the target language.