La preposición A ante el objeto directo en italiano/le: ¿fosilización por interferencia o error de competencia?

Abstract

Teaching experience has shown us that the mistake made by Spanish-speaking students of placing the preposition "A" before animate direct objects in Italian persists up to advanced levels of their interlanguage. With the present work, we wish to demonstrate the high incidence of this error and its causes in a group of 48 Spanish students from first level of Italian as a foreign language. The test they performed involved the translation of 20 sentences from Spanish to Italian in which a direct object, an indirect object or both appeared. Our study is included within the framework of broader research work in which different mistakes regarding the eight most commonItalian prepositions (A, CON, DA, DI, IN, PER, SU, TRA/FRA) and their possible causes are analysed. As far as methodology is concerned, we have used Error Analysis (Corder 1967, 1981) and Interlanguage (Selinker 1969, 1972). The results obtained have revealed that this is not exclusively an interlinguistic error (due to the transfer of the Spanish MT to the Italian L2), but that there are also some productions that demonstrate deficient grammatical competence in the mother tongue, which leads students to make mistakes in the target language.