Control and inflected infinitives in L2 European Portuguese

Abstract

It is known that knowledge of the interpretative properties of the standard inflected infinitive develops late both in L1 and L2 acquisition, and that subject control with most verbs is acquired early in L1. In this study we focus on a context which has not been addressed so far, and investigate how the interpretation of the null subjects of inflected infinitival complements of subject control verbs develops in the interlanguage of Englishand Spanish-speaking learners of L2 European Portuguese. We applied a selection task to intermediate and advanced learners in order to understand whether they differentiate between inflected and uninflected infinitives in these contexts and whether they assign control properties to the inflected infinitive. Our findings show that, although learners accept the occurrence of inflected infinitives with subject control verbs and assign a controlled reading to the infinitival null subject, knowledge of some of the properties of these constructions is delayed, namely, which verbs allow inflected infinitives and what are the interpretative properties of inflected infinitival subjects under different control verbs.