Exclusively reflexive verbs in Spanish: a study of its acquisition among English speaking students at university level

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the syntactic and semantic behavior of the so called quasi-reflexive or mandatory reflexive verbs in Spanish such as enterarse, quejarse, burlarse, acordarse, fijarse or jactarse can be learned and assimilated in a native-like manner by English native speakers who have reached an advance or an intermediate level of Spanish. The experiment carried out consisted of a grammaticality judgment task with six quasi-reflexive verbs forms and eighteen fillers. Three different groups of participants performed the task: a control group of native speakers of Spanish, a graduate student group with a high level of Spanish and an undergraduate student group with an intermediate level of Spanish. The data gathered and their statistical analyses seem to prove that there is a significant difference in the way native and non native speakers of Spanish judge grammatical and agrammatical quasi-reflexive verbs constructions in Spanish.

Keywords

• grammaticality judgement test
• mandatory reflexive verbs in Spanish
• quasi-reflexive verbs in Spanish
• Spanish acquisition
• Spanish as a second language