| This dissertation represents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of interlanguage. It connects issues in classroom-based second language acquisition to topics in sociolinguistics by exploring the relationship between native-speaker (NS) and second-language (L2) variation. Specifically, the linguistic and extra-linguistic variables influencing L2 learners' development of mood use (the subjunctive and indicative contrast) are described and compared to those characterizing the use of NSs of Spanish. In this investigation, 150 L2 learners with a range of proficiency levels and NSs completed three oral-elicitation tasks in Spanish. The frequency and multivariate statistical analyses, conducted using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 15.0, identified stages of development at which L2 learners of Spanish begin to employ the subjunctive mood in the same linguistic contexts as NSs. The cross-sectional data demonstrated that, as the subjunctive developed, L2 learners expanded and restructured their form-meaning associations and they produced a range of verb forms in mood-choice contexts. Furthermore, the sentence-level variable of semantic category influenced L2 learners' mood use before the discourse-level features of time reference and hypotheticality and the word-level variable of form regularity. The extra-linguistic variable of task was the only factor that predicted mood use for each participant group. The results also showed that the most advanced L2 learners used the subjunctive in largely the same linguistic contexts as the NSs; only subtle differences between the two groups were observed. This dissertation further supports the idea that the variationist framework (i.e., analyses of frequency and predictors) enables linguists to systematically analyze, identify, and describe first and second-language variation, and it demonstrates that variation must be accounted for in order to truly understand how L2 acquisition progresses and what processes are involved. |
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