The POSSIBLE INFLUENCE OF BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE (L1) ON THE REALIZATION OF NULL DEFINITE SUBJECTS IN ENGLISH (L2)

Abstract

The aim of the present analysis is to discuss the possible influence of bilinguals’ first language (L1) on their second language (L2) performance. We investigated if undergraduate students of Portuguese-English from Rio de Janeiro would accept definite null subjects in English, which is a possibility in Brazilian Portuguese (PB), but not in English. We selected the syntactic patterns and the semantic features which still favor or disfavor the null subject realization in PB in order to examine if and how the behavior of the L1 could be reflected on the L2 via a grammatical judgment test. We expected that in the structural contexts in which PB shows a higher percentage of null subjects, our participants would have more difficulty to identify missing subjects in English and, in structural contexts in which PB exhibits high percentages of overt subject pronouns, our participants would realize the absence of pronouns more easily. The analysis of our data supports, partially, our previous hypothesis. We finish our study acknowledging that the bilingual experience is dynamic and that both languages are in constant interaction in a bilingual’s mind.