Amaya Mendikoetxea Pelayo‘s talk “‘It exist(s) many problems’: exploring word order in L2 English”, delivered on 17 Nov 2015 at the Faculty of Philology and Translation in Vigo, focused on the production of postverbal subjects in L2 English by L1 speakers of languages characterised as allowing ‘free inversion’ of the subject in V(erb) S(ubject) structures, such as Spanish and Italian. In English subject inversion (VS) is limited to contexts in which the verb is unaccusative, denoting existence or appearance, and also when the inverted subject is long or ‘heavy’ and expresses new (or relatively new) information. Dr Mendikoetxea described constructions found in the L2 English of L1 Spanish and Italian and paid attention to the verb type, the nature of the postverbal element and the elements found in the preverbal field. The analysis carried out has revealed that Spanish (and Italian) speakers produce inversion constructions under the same conditions as native speakers, but has shown persistent problems in the encoding of syntactic properties, producing mostly ungrammatical examples. In her research she has used both naturally produced examples (from corpora) and experimental data, and has argued that combining data from different elicitation methods is crucial for Second Language Acquisition research.
Amaya Mendikoetxea Pelayo lectures at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She holds a BA from the University of Deusto and a PhD from the University of York. She has developed research stays in different institutions in the United Kingdom (Lancaster, Leeds) and the United States (UCLA, MIT). In her publications Dr Mendikoetxea has approached a number of linguistic issues in the grammar of English and Spanish by adopting syntactic and discourse-related variables. In particular, she has dealt with left and right peripheries (focus, topic), subject inversion, so-called there sentences, causative constructions, passivisation, middle and impersonal structures, etc. She has focused on the acquisition of syntax by learners of English and has used in this respect native and learner corpora. She has been the PI of several projects funded by Spanish Ministries and the regional government in Madrid. As part of these projects, Dr Mendikoetxea has coordinated the compilation of Corpus Escrito del Español L2 (CEDEL2) and the comparable corpus of L1 Spanish–L2 English WriCLE (Written Corpus of Learner English). WriCLE has been annotated using UAM CorpusTool, including information about morphosyntactic categories (voice, modality, polarity, finiteness), semantic classes (human, organisation, location) and syntactic function (subject, object).