The basic variety in learners of closely related languages

Abstract Longitudinal studies conducted within the ESF project in the 1980s revealed recurrent interlanguage stages developed by learners of different L2s and with different L1s, where similar morphological categories and syntactic properties emerged gradually and consistently, regardless of learners’ L1, age, or acquisition context, albeit at varying paces. A Basic Variety (BV) has been identified as an initial stage of such a developmental path: a simplified, structurally reduced linguistic system typically characterized by the absence of inflectional morphology and a pragmatic-semantic organization of utterances. This study investigates whether the concept of BV applies to untutored Spanish-speaking learners of Italian, analysing spontaneous and semi-spontaneous oral productions collected from recently arrived learners through a community-based data collection approach. It specifically focuses on forms and functions of verbal morphology: the early emergence of hybrid forms with functional value may indicate a possible phonological/morphological restructuring process originating from the source language. The use of a BV in such a context appears as an additional resource in cases of communicative breakdown.