Pilar Larrañaga

Clitics in L1 bilingual acquisition

Data from two bilingual Basque–Spanish children are analysed with respect to the grammatical domain of clitic drop, involving the interface between pragmatics and syntax. Basque Spanish allows for clitic drop in referential contexts, an option that does not exist in standard Spanish. The data suggest that the early high rate of clitic drop is most probably due to two factors: first, cross-linguistic influence from Basque because Basque lacks clitics – and hence the complement position is either occupied by a DP or pro – and both children studied in the present article drop more clitics in Spanish than the monolinguals reported in the literature (Fujino & Sano, 2002); and second, because children seem to have a notion of topic that equals information recoverability.

L1 Transfer in the Acquisition of Manner and Path in Spanish by Native Speakers of English

In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner.

The Linguistic Competence of Early Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children and a Spanish Monolingual Child

In this article, we sought to investigate the acquisition of gender features by two Basque–Spanish bilingual children when compared to a Spanish monolingual child. Basque is a language that lacks gender features and nominal agreement, whereas Spanish classifies nouns into two classes, that is, masculine and feminine, and has determiner phrase internal agreement. The internal architecture of Basque and Spanish differ on two crucial ways: the presence or absence of agreement and the presence or absence of the syntactic projection ClassP. Hence, the acquisition of gender sheds some light on the internal architecture of the determiner phrase. The studies on gender acquisition by Spanish monolinguals or bilinguals of any combination are not numerous. For this reason, we provide a detailed description of gender development and a thorough analysis of gender errors by a monolingual Spanish child and two Basque–Spanish bilinguals. This study shows that the masculine is not the default gender, neither for the monolingual child analysed nor for bilinguals because both groups overgeneralize masculine as well as feminine. Moreover, none of the children exclusively use the masculine with all nouns at a first stage to converge to target grammar in a subsequent stage. Basque–Spanish bilinguals use masculine determiners with feminine nouns in the majority of contexts from the outset of language acquisition, whereas the monolingual child performs the opposite way. Interestingly, bilinguals require more time to acquire the intricacies of Spanish gender. In other words, they make gender errors even at advanced stages of development, when the monolingual Spanish child studied in this article presents a target-like gender performance. The analysed data show that Basque influences Spanish, resulting in language delay because of the internal architecture of the determiner phrase and to a minor extent by the surface overlap between Spanish and Basque. However, our interpretation is cautious because of the scarcity of such examples and the limited corpus available.

The acquisition of copula verbs in Basque by bilinguals

This article focuses on the acquisition of copula verbs in Basque by Basque–Spanish bilinguals. Basque and Spanish have two copula verbs: izan and egon and ser and estar, respectively. Basque copulas are similar to their Spanish counterparts in terms of the grammatical contexts in which they are used. However, Basque and Spanish differ in one specific property, the progressive, which is built with izan in Basque. This article assumes the theoretical framework of Zagona for Basque because copula selection can be accounted for by this approach. The present study is the first one to address the issue of the acquisition of copula verbs by Basque–Spanish bilingual children in Basque; we analyze the language used in a storytelling task by 19 Basque-dominant bilinguals compared to that used by 19 child L2 Basque learners, in order to elucidate whether both groups of bilingual children use the copula in a target-like way in Basque. The study shows that no copula choice errors are produced by any of the participants with any predicates. The distribution of the predicates very much resembles the distribution of the predicates in previous studies for Spanish. Adhering to Zagona’s framework, the progressive was included in our study. In this respect, the progressive is used in a target-deviant manner, a finding that can be attributed to crosslinguistic influence. These results are ultimately attributed to children’s parallel knowledge of both interpretable and uninterpretable features, although uninterpretable features seem to be acquired a little earlier.

Basque bilingualism: A tale of many stories

The present volume presents six papers, which study a number of topics in Basque by bilingual Basque-Spanish children growing up in the Autonomous Basque Region in Spain. The authors have dealt with a number of subjects, which range from lexical to genuinely syntactic issues, whereby all papers address the issue of whether one of the languages acquired by a child influences the other. The language combination studied in the present volume offers plenty of opportunities to inquire whether cross-linguistic influence occurs and which factors may determine or explain its duration, language internal or structural issues and language external or sociolinguistic factors. For the study of any phenomena that concern the Basque and Spanish languages, it is important to mention that these two languages have coexisted for many centuries, which has resulted in a number of contact phenomena that are already grammaticalized (see below). For the study of early language acquisition and language learning at school, it is of the utmost importance to take the complex sociolinguistic environment into account when drawing conclusions and making generalizations on the basis of a limited corpus. In what follows, we will briefly present the issue of cross-linguistic influence as it is discussed at present, we continue with a description of the most important grammatical facts and will finish with the actual sociolinguistic situation, which includes a historical and synchronic perspective.Let us begin with the issue of cross-linguistic influence. The growth in linguistic literature, which has been devoted to different acquisition types within bilingualism in the last two decades or so, has led us to rethink the issue of research in the field of language acquisition in a number of ways, that is, themes to be studied, methodological issues and ultimately interpretation of primary data. A variety of questions has been discussed in the past, such as whether bilinguals attain the same level of competence in both languages and whether bilingual acquisition is more costly than monolingual acquisition. One of the most controversially discussed papers in bilingual language acquisition has been the seminal work by Volterra and Taeschner (1978) who proposed that bilinguals, initially, had one lexicon for both languages, which splits into two at a second stage. The second stage is also characterized by the existence of one grammar which splits into two at a later stage. The gradual emergence of two languages out of one lexicon as suggested by Volterra and Taeschner has been severely criticized due to the methodological and conceptual shortcomings of the article over many years and was abandoned in terms of explanatory adequacy. However, any scholar working in the area of bilingual acquisition was aware of the fact that, although ultimate attainment in monolingual and bilingual acquisition was in most cases identical, some stages between onset and ultimate attainment in bilingual settings contained features that could be attributable to one of the two languages being acquired and, hence, required some attention rather a mere mention. However, the divergences observed between monolingual and bilingual acquisition had not been a matter of any theoretical discussion until Hulk and Muller (2000) and Muller and Hulk (2001) proposed that the languages acquired by bilinguals could influence each other provided some language internal constraints were met. Cross-linguistic influence is expected to occur:1. In the syntax-pragmatics domain if2. the languages at stake differ in structural terms but share some superficial properties.Based on these premises, a great deal of research in various language combinations (Basque- Spanish, German-French, Spanish-English, German-Italian and German-English bilingualism to quote the most well-known combinations) has been conducted, which was able to show that crosslinguistic influence in the alluded domain exists and, more importantly, is attributable to the other language being acquired (Kupisch, 2008; Larranaga & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2012; Muller & Hulk, 2001, to cite but a few). …