Crosslinguistic Influence of Auxiliary Verbs in Spanish and English – ser, estar and be

Sa？etak This paper presents a study on possible crosslinguistic influence between the Spanish and English auxiliary verb systems in Spanish learners of English. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the two auxiliary verb systems, together with the existing theoretical approaches to the distribution of Spanish verbs ser and estar. The research part of the study consists of a tripartite questionnaire that was given to Spanish students who attend a Spanish-English bilingual school program, as well as to their teachers, language assistants who are all English native speakers with Spanish as L2. The results indicate that Spanish students, even though involved in a Spanish-English immersion program still do not show any marked influence of English in their use of ser and estar, and mostly rely on their intuition in their choice between the two auxiliaries. English native speakers, as expected, had most problems in their choice of ser and estar with a particular adjective, as well as with fixed expressions which involve only one of the auxiliaries. In their choice they primarily rely on grammatical rules they acquired while learning Spanish