Learning hierarchy: a case study with "por" and "para"

Abstract

 Like any other non-obvious opposition, the difficulty of learning the Spanish prepositional opposition por-para is well known, for students of Spanish as a Foreign Language (E/LE). In facing a situation of this type, in which the repetition of certain idiosyncratic forms is evident, we asked ourselves the reason of this phenomenon; we reached the conclusion that the origin of the mistakes could be the same one. Therefore, in this article, first of all, we intend to investigate on the acquisition process of por-para by describing the relationship between form and function during the different stages of interlanguage development in Italian and English mother tongue students. Secondly, we will try to formulate a possible acquisition order of semantic values attributed to these prepositions in different usage contexts.