The Use of Grammatical Possession in Spanish (L2) by Turkish Students (L1) –An Empirical Study

This empirical study explores the acquisition of the three main structures to express the grammatical possession in Spanish— the verb tener, the possessive adjectives and the prepositional syntagma with the structure “article + possessum + de + owner”— in a group of students whose L1 is the Turkish language. Our objective is to understand the reasons and the hypothesis that brought each of the students to make the final decisions, sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly, at the time of expressing the grammatical possession in Spanish. In order to do this, we have focused on the errors made by the students when using these structures with the aim of evaluating the level of acquisition of the structures, identifying which structures create more problems at the time of production and explaining the reasons why these errors are made.