A glance at the syntactic and semantic principles underlying the Spanish clitic se: A study in second language acquisition.

Abstract

The study investigates some of the factors that may guide and constrain the university-level, nonnative Spanish speaker's use of the Spanish pronominal clitic se in written discourse. I examine computer-conferencing messages written by eighty-six university students of Spanish who completed their second year of Spanish in consecutive semesters. A Cognitive Grammar analysis and a VARBRUL analysis are applied to the data. VARBRUL, a variable rule statistical analysis, enables me to explore certain linguistic, sociolinguistic, and semantic factors that may be constraining the second language (L2) use of se. Cognitive Grammar, a theory of language which views semantic structure as conceptual structure, is the theoretical foundation for the analysis of cognitive and semantic factors that may be influencing the manner in which these learners are construing se. The study serves as an empirical basis on which to better inform the teaching of se in the second language classroom.