The role of ambiguity in second language change

The case of Mozambican African Portuguese

Bibliographic Data

ID11655934
AuthorsPerpétua GONÇALVES (0000-0003-0334-0919, Eduardo Mondlane University, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume18
Issue4
Pages325-347
Publication date2002-09-24
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSecond language Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0267-6583 • E-ISSN: 1477-0326
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1191/0267658302sr209oa
OpenAlexW2039848743
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited16

In this article, my point of departure is that language change is driven by acquisition, and I argue that the triggers for establishing the properties of language-specific grammars differ according to whether first language (L1) or second language (L2) acquisition is involved. The reason for this is that in L2 acquisition evidence about the target grammar may be ambiguous in ways which do not occur in L1 acquisition. To illustrate the argument, I present two case studies of Mozambican African Portuguese, a nonnative variety of Portuguese acquired during childhood by L1 speakers of Bantu languages. These case studies show that strings generated by the grammar of European Portuguese may trigger ‘wrong/new’ parameter values which, although nonexistent in the original grammatical system, are perfectly legitimate from the point of view of the speakers’ L1 grammars. In both cases, although the new parameter settings (NPSs) are not convergent with the target grammar, resetting is blocked because the new parameter values successfully analyse the input. The nonresetting of the ‘wrong/new’ parameter values in the direction of the target European norm can be attributed to the social context of language acquisition, where the original European model is considerably diluted, and the surface effects they set off appear to be denser since the L2 speakers are in the majority

Ambiguity · Argument (complex analysis · Context (archaeology · European Portuguese · Grammar · Language acquisition · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Norm (philosophy · Political science · Portuguese · Rule-based machine translation · Second-language acquisition · Universal Grammar · Variety (cybernetics · Computer Science · History · Language Development and Disorders · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence

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