The acquisition of copular constructions in European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers

Abstract This research targets the acquisition of copular constructions by Chinese learners of European Portuguese (EP), evaluating the impact of the potential absence of the copular verb in Chinese in the acquisition of EP and determining whether L2 learners associate the copular verbs ser and estar in EP with their [+/−stage-level] semantic values. Moreover, it intends to assess whether non-native speakers acquire non-default features of ser when it combines with a PP predicate locating events. 102 participants completed an acceptability judgment task including APs and PPs. The results demonstrate that learners readily acquire the features that configure the presence of the verb in EP and associate ser and estar with the adequate semantic values, but show greater difficulty in acquiring non-default features of ser ([+ s −level, +dynamic]). We relate this progression in the acquisition path to the hierarchy of meso-, micro- and nanoparameters proposed by the updated Bottleneck Hypothesis ( Slabakova, 2019 ).