Adquisición/aprendizaje del artículo en español por hablantes de estonio

Abstract

This Doctoral thesis, titled Acquisition/Learning of Articles in Spanish by Estonian Speakers, presents a study of Spanish article acquisition by Estonian speakers, with the purpose being to learn about the interlanguage of Estonian (L1) learners of Spanish (L2), thus facilitating their acquisition/learning of articles. The results of the investigation confirmed our hypothesis regarding the difficulty of acquiring the definite article, the relative ease of acquiring the indefinite article due to its similarity to the numeral (one – uno), as well as hypercorrections appearing in the context of the zero/null article. We have concluded an empirical study of error analysis based on a corpus of 20 samples from Estonian (L1) speakers of Spanish (L2) living in Estonia, using exercises that include written samples of levels B-C that correspond to article usage, a corpus of 20 samples from Estonian (L1) speakers of Spanish (L2) living in Spain (levels B-C), and a corpus of 20 samples from native speakers (Spanish in Spain). The comparison of two groups (Est-Esp and Est-Est) produced evidence of the fact that the errors found at the B and C level are similar, with the most common being the replacing of the definite article with another element and errors in adding a definite article in the context of a zero/null article, although we also found many errors in the context of the indefinite article...