Eventive and Stative Passives: The Role of Transfer in the Acquisition of ser and estar by German and English L1 Speakers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports on an empirical study that examined knowledge of the properties of the two passives in the L2 Spanish grammar of L1 speakers of English and German. The Full Transfer Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse 1994) predicts that learners should be able to acquire the relevant properties, but German speakers may have an advantage in noticing the difference. The study comprised three groups of speakers: an English L1 group, a German L1 group, and a Spanish native speaker control group. The tasks consisted of a Grammaticality Judgment Task and a Sentence Selection Task. Results showed that (a) the English group and the German group did not differ significantly, so the overt marking did not provide the learners with any advantage, and (b) both groups differed from the native speakers in the interpretation of the subject as generic, which is only possible with eventives, although this property is instantiated in their first languages. This is taken as evidence against the Full Transfer Hypothesis and in support of Selective Transfer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".