Morfologia de flexão verbal no inglês como L2: Uma abordagem a partir da morfologia distribuída

Abstract

The present study investigates the variability in the use of inflectional verbal morphology in the acquisition of English as a foreign/ second language by speakers of Brazilian Portuguese in an instructional setting. Its main aim is to verify if the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis could account for the variable production of inflectional morphology of lexical verbs as well as copula and auxiliary BE in the speech of two groups of learners. This research is based on previous studies that have corroborated the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis and other studies that have refuted it. It also has, as its theoretical background, the syntactic theory of generative grammar related to agreement and tense marking, as well as the theory presented by the Distributed Morphology approach to grammar. The Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis studies have shown that the syntax of agreement/ tense would be unimpaired and the variable production of inflectional morphology would be a result of mapping problems in the realization of surface forms, that is, the problems would lie in the mapping from abstract features to their surface morphological representation. This hypothesis, which takes the theory of Distributed Morphology as a point of departure, suggests that there would be underspecified features in the learners abstract representation, accounting for the occurrence of non-finite forms in finite and non-finite contexts. Our initial hypothesis is that the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis is able to explain the variability found in the learners oral production of verbal morphology and that there would be transfer effects from the mother language in initial stages of interlanguage development. Samples of spontaneous and elicited oral production were collected and a grammatical judgment test was applied. Statistical tests were done and the results showed that there is a possible L1 transfer effect. In addition, the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis was not able to account for all the observed phenomena.