Acquisition of indicative / subjunctive modal selection by Italian-speaking students of Spanish: analysis of errors most common

Abstract

Learning the inflection of verbs for Spanish represents one of the most important difficulties in order to acquire full command of such a language. This is so for Italian students as well, whose mother tongue is normally considered very similar to Spanish. This paper describes a set of results based on the study of the morphology of verbs gathered by analysing a corpus of written compositions (namely 112 essays written by 16 intermediate University students). The total number of errors is considerably high (57% consist of errors of form and inflection). A number of categories have been used to explain these errors: those of form and inflexion, those in which the paradigm is regularized, those of negative transference, overgeneralisation, confusion in the paradigm and those of interference of the L1, overgeneralisation. It is concluded that formal instruction is necessary to acquire verbal morphology and further studies are proposed.