Pronominal Encapsulation in Spanish L2 Young Writers' Texts

This article explores the referential and connective functions of pronominal anaphoric encapsulation in Spanish L2 young learners' texts. For this purpose, a contrastive study of Spanish neuter pronouns ello, esto, eso and aquello is carried out on four subcorpus (young and adult writers, learners and native writers). The study attends, on one hand, to the syntactic constructions in which the pronominal encapsulators are included and, on the other hand, to the discursive connections these constructions hold. The results do not show significant distinguishing features of young learners' texts. They do show, instead, a decidedly overuse of pronominal encapsulators by young native writers, as well as more frequent constructions in the two groups of learners, who use, to a greater extent, the consecutive construction por eso and the attributive construction pronominal encapsulator + ser. Native writers, especially adults, use a greater variety of constructions, which allows them to establish more complex discourse connections.