Juana M. Liceras

Topic-drop versus pro-drop: null subjects and pronominal subjects in the Spanish L2 of Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese speakers

Recent developments within the so-called Principles and Parameters model of acquisition argue for a clear-cut separation of Universal Grammar (UG) principles from parametric options and locate all parameters within functional categories (Borer, 1984; Lebeaux, 1988; Chomsky, 1991). This has led Tsimpli and Roussou (1991) to propose that adult L2 (second language) learners have access to UG principles but do not reset the parameters of the L2, which amounts to saying that null subjects in the adult Spanish L2 may or may not have the same status as native Spanish null subjects, depending on the speakers’ L1 (first language) and the UG principles at stake. In the case of L1 acquisition, Rizzi (1994) and Hyams (1994) provide a competence account of null subjects in early child English which relate them to adult English Diary Drop and German-style topic-drop rather than to Spanish-style pro-drop. They specifically argue that these missing subjects are restricted to the first position of non-wh root clauses and that fixing the null subject parameter will consist of incorporating the ROOT=CP principle into this grammar. In this paper, we analyse the Spanish L2 oral spontaneous data produced by adult L1 speakers of pro-drop and topic-drop languages in an attempt to provide a competence account of null subjects in adult nonnative Spanish. Our data show that, unlike early English grammars,all the Spanish non-native grammars contain null subjects both in matrix and subordinate clauses, and that this is the case at the early and advanced stages. It also shows that many non-native pronominal subjects do not have the same value as native Spanish subjects and that subject pronouns are used for identification purposes. It is suggested that these data provide evidence for a model of L2 acquisition where adult non-native grammar construction resorts to a default licensing procedure which allows null pronouns provided they can be identified.

The role of formal features in second language acquisition

Contents: Introduction: Formal Features in Linguistic Theory and Learnability: The View From Second Language Acquisition. Part I: Linguistic Theory and Learnability. L. Travis, The Role of Features in Syntactic Theory and Language Variation. C. Platzack, Uninterpretable Features and EPP: A Minimalist Account of Language Build-Up and Break-Down. A. Radford, Feature Correlations in Nominative Case-Marking in L1, L2 and Native English. D. Lardiere, Feature-Assembly in Second Language Acquisition. Part II: Determiner Phrase Related Features. I.M. Tsimpli, M. Mastropavlou, Feature-Interpretability in L2 Acquisition and SLI: Greek Clitics and Determiners. C. Jakubowicz, L. Roulet, Narrow Syntax or Interface Deficit? Gender Agreement in French SLI. T. Ionin, H. Ko, K. Wexler, The Role of Semantic Features in the Acquisition of English Articles by Russian and Korean Speakers. J.B. de Garavito, Acquisition of the Spanish Plural by French L1 Speakers: The Role of Transfer. Part III: Inflection Phrase and Aspect Phrase-Related Related Features. Section 1: Finiteness, Agreement, and Tense. L. White, Some Puzzling Features of L2 Features. R. Hawkins, G. Casillas, H. Hattori, J. Hawthorne, R. Husted, C. Lozano, A. Okamoto, E. Thomas, K. Yamada, The Semantic Effects of Verb Raising and Its Consequences in Second Language Grammars. P. Prevost, Knowledge of Morphology and Syntax in Early Adult L2 French: Evidence for the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. I. Leung, The Verbal Functional Domain in L2A and L3A: Tense and Agreement in Cantonese-English-French Interlanguage. Section 2: Aspect. E. Gavruseva, On the Role of DP in the Acquisition of Finiteness in Child L2 English. A.T. Perez-Leroux, A. Cuza, M. Majzlanova, J.S. Naranjo, Non-Native Recognition of Iterative and Habitual Meanings of Spanish Preterite and Imperfect Tenses. R. Slabakova, S. Montrul, Aspectual Shifts: Grammatical and Pragmatic Knowledge in L2 Acquisition. L. Diaz, A. Bel, K. Bekiou, The Role of Morphological Features in the Acquisition of Spanish Aspectual Differences. Part IV: Complementizer Phrase-Related Features. S. Flynn, I. Winnitska, C. Foley, Complementizer Phrase Features in Child L1 and Adult L3 Acquisition. E. Valenzuela, On Complementizer Pharase Positions in L2 Spanish.

Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English–Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence

The presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories has occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition research. In bilingual acquisition a central learnability issue has been to determine whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns. In this article, the authors analyse the omission/production of subject pronouns in the developing Spanish grammar and of copula be in the developing English grammar of two English–Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the issues of the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. The authors argue that the directionality of interlinguistic influence is determined by the need to implement core operations of the computational system and that the lexical–semantic interface is an area of the grammar where interlinguistic influence occurs.

Bilingual early functional-lexical mixing and the activation of formal features

We have argued that the grammatical features spell-out hypothesis (GFSH) (Liceras, Spradlin, Perales, Fernández, & Álvarez, 2003; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003a) accounts for the functional-lexical mixing patterns that prevail in the case of Determiner Phrases produced by bilingual (English-Spanish) children. This hypothesis (Liceras, 2002; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003b) states that in the process of activating the features of the two grammars, the child, who will rely on the two lexicons, will make codemixing choices which will favor the functional categories containing the largest array of uninterpretable features (Chomsky, 1998, 1999). This implies that in the case of English/ Spanish child acquisition data, mixed utterances such as el book (Spanish Determiner + English Noun) will prevail over mixed utterances such as the libro (English Determiner + Spanish Noun). Thus, in the process of acquisition, children pay special attention to the visible morpho-phonological triggers which lead to the activation of abstract formal features.

Copula Omission in the English Developing Grammar of English/Spanish Bilingual Children.

Abstract The present study takes as a point of departure Beckers analysis of the copula be in English monolingual data and focuses on the distribution of copula be in the data from two English/Spanish bilingual children. Our data analysis shows that, as in Beckers study, the distribution of copula omission in the bilingual data is determined by the nature of the predicate. However, the omission patterns in our English bilingual data do not coincide with those described by Becker for the English monolingual data, since total omission is very low in our data and there are no significant differences between the stage-level (SL) and the individual-level (IL) predicates. We attribute this to crosslinguistic influence from Spanish, specifically, to the existence of two distinct copulas in Spanish, ser and estar; in particular, we propose that the lexical distinction between these two predicates may trigger the earlier projection of inflection and with it the use of an overt copula in both languages, but specifically in English, and for both SL and IL predicates.

L1/L2 Spanish grammars and the pragmatic deficit hypothesis

In recent research on primary (L1) and non-primary (L2) acquisition,special attention has been given to whether syntactic development is subject to a continuity condition. While it has been proposed that the continuity condition applies to both L1 and L2 syntactic growth,the changes that take place in developing grammars have sometimes been attributed to other cognitive systems. Specifically, it has been proposed that child grammars are ‘underspecified’ because they lack a pragmatic principle which determines the range of indices available for establishing verbal and nominal coreference. According to this proposal, a grammar which is underspecified for Number has null subjects and bare NPs only with non-inflected verb forms. Assuming that adults will not have a pragmatic deficit of the kind proposed for children, we have analysed data from child L1 Spanish and adult L2 Spanish. The results of our analysis show that: (1) in child L1 Spanish, the feature Person may encode Number so that when Person is distinctively implemented, root infinitives and bare NP subjects will cease to occur. However, the pervasive morphology of Spanish verbs conspires against the possibility of providing clear-cut evidence for underspecification in the case of child Spanish; (2) the different nature of L1 and L2 root infinitives may provide partial evidence for underspecification in the case of L1 Spanish; and (3) in the case of L2 learners, the distribution of null and overt subjects seems to be partially determined by their L1 rather than by underspecification.

The Compounding Parameter and the Word-Marker Hypothesis

Research on L 1, L2 and L1 bilingual acquisition of compounding has aimed at determining the underlying knowledge which leads learners to produce compounds (Alegre and Gordon 1996; Clark and Berman 1987; Clark, 1998; Nicoladis 1999; Liceras and Diaz 2000) and has addressed issues such as Kiparsky’s (1985) morphological level ordering constraint (Gordon 1985; Lardiere 1995; Nicoladis 2001), the dual-mechanism model of mental representation of regular and irregular inflection (Clahsen 1995; Clahsen et al. 1995; Murphy 2000) and bilinguals’ ability to differentiate compound formation in two given languages (Hulk and Van der Linden 1996; Nicoladis 1999), to mention a few. Furthermore, acquisition data on compounding has also been taken as evidence to decide whether morphology should be considered a separate module from syntax and the lexicon (Lardiere 1998). In this paper, following the proposal adopted by the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) that takes the lexicon as depositary of language variation, we use Piera’s (1995) account of the differences between English and Spanish N-N compounds to investigate whether adult L2 learners rely on the abstract `word marker’ feature of Spanish substantives (Harris 1991a, 1991b) to acquire the morphological and syntactic properties of Spanish N-N compounds.

The acquisition of L3 English negation by bilingual (Spanish/Basque) learners in an institutional setting

In this article we study the acquisition of sentential negation in English by bilingual (Spanish/Basque) learners in an institutional setting. The learners were divided into three groups according to the age at which they had begun to learn English (four, eight and eleven years respectively). At the time the oral interviews were held, they had all received a similar amount of instruction. The analysis is carried out in terms of the presence/absence of functional categories, the use of cognitive (not UG-driven) strategies, and the transfer of the order of the functional projections NegP and TP. We conclude that placement of the negative marker appears to be independent of the realization of tense and agreement features.

Second Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory in the 21st Century

Syntactic theory has played a role in second language acquisition (SLA) research since the early 1980s, when the principles and parameters model of generative grammar was implemented. However, it was the so-called functional parameterization hypothesis together with the debate on whether second language learners activated new features or switched their value that led to detailed and in-depth analyses of the syntactic properties of many different nonnative grammars. In the last 10 years, with the minimalist program as background, these analyses have diverted more and more from looking at those syntactic properties that argued for or against the various versions of the UG-access versus non-UG-access debate (UG for Universal Grammar) and have more recently delved into the status of nonnative grammars in the cognitive science field. Thus, using features (i.e., gender, case, verb, and determiner) as the basic units and paying special attention to the quality of input as well as to processing principles and constraints, nonnative grammars have been compared to the language contact paradigms that underlie subsequent bilingualism, child SLA, creole formation, and diachronic change. Taking Chomskys I-language/E-language construct as the framework, this article provides a review of these recent developments in SLA research.

Subjective frequency norms for 330 Spanish simple and compound words

Ratings were collected from 102 native speakers of Spanish on the subjective frequency of occurrence of 330 Spanish words, including 120 deverbal compounds and their constituents. These ratings were found to be highly reliable, whether items were analyzed together or separately by type (i.e., compounds, nouns, verbs), as evidenced by indexes of internal consistency and test-retest reliability that were equal to or greater than.98. The validity of the normative ratings was attested to by statistically significant correlations with objective frequency, estimated at.63 for all items together, and.41,.51, and.78 for compounds, nouns, and verbs, respectively. Among the substantive issues addressed was the potential dependency in ratings for compounds and their associated verb-noun constituents. No relationship was discerned, supporting the idea that compound and constituent ratings are statistically independent in this experimental task. The theoretical and methodological implications of the findings are discussed. The ratings can be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.