Reverse transfer in clitic collocation a study on Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This study focuses on reverse transfer, L2 influences on L1, with L1 as the dominant language. It investigates clitic collocation in complex verb phrases, contrasting Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Spanish. Spanish presents a stable system with proclisis to the auxiliary verb (clitic climbing) or enclisis to the main verb. BP has lost clitic climbing during the XIX century, but schooling tries to recover it, although in oral natural production, proclisis to the main verb is the preferred option. Thus, high-educated BP speakers, in principle, could still admit clitic climbing, regardless of any fluency in Spanish. By its turn, a high acceptance of clitic climbing in BP could also constitute a case of reverse transfer, if related to BP/Spanish bilinguals. In order to tease it apart, a self-paced reading experimental task with a Likert scale grammatical judgment, manipulating the position of the clitic in Portuguese sentences with high-educated monolingual BP speakers and BP/high-proficiency Spanish bilinguals was conducted. The results show that both groups accept clitic climbing in written BP sentences, but bilinguals accept it even more, and are faster in reading Portuguese sentences with clitic climbing, suggesting that Spanish clitic collocation may interfere in the processing of Portuguese sentences.