Early null and overt subjects in the Spanish of simultaneous English-Spanish bilinguals and Crosslinguistic Influence

  1. Villa-García, Julio
  2. Suárez-Palma, Imanol
Revista:
Revista española de lingüística aplicada

ISSN: 0213-2028

Año de publicación: 2016

Volumen: 29

Volumen: 2

Páginas: 350-395

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.1075/RESLA.29.2.01VIL DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Otras publicaciones en: Revista española de lingüística aplicada

Resumen

This study assesses the scope of the Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI) hypothesis’ predictions with regard to early bilingual acquisition. To this end, we analyze longitudinal corpus data from four bilinguals attesting the acquisition of subjecthood (null versus overt; preverbal versus postverbal) and the pragmatic adequacy of early null and overt subjects in a null-subject language (i.e., Spanish) in combination with a language differing in its pro-drop parameter setting (i.e., English). Our results indicate that CLI barely affects the development of subjects in the null-subject language at the initial stages, namely at the outset of null and overt subjects, and in turn support the Separate Development Hypothesis. Our bilingual cohort patterns with their Spanish-acquiring monolingual peer in that both groups display comparable proportions of null subjects as well as acquisitional trajectories of null and overt subjects at the early stages of acquisition. Much like monolinguals, bilinguals begin to produce preverbal and postverbal subjects concurrently. The bilingual children and the monolingual child of this study actually produce extremely high rates of pragmatically appropriate covert and overt subjects, which are for the most part target-like from the start, thus pointing to the absence of CLI effects. In light of monolingual and bilingual data, the paper also revisits the hotly debated issue of the ‘no overt subject’ stage of Grinstead (1998, et seq.), its existence in child Spanish being questionable.

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We are grateful to Ludovica Serratrice for initial guidance and suggestions, as well as Antxon Olarrea for comments on an early draft. We are also indebted to the audience at the regular seminar series of the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences of the University of Reading, especially Jorge Gonz?lez Alonso and Jason Rothman, and to the audience at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics Colloquium at the University of Arizona. We are thankful to the anonymous abstract reviewers and the audiences of The Romance Turn VIII (UAB, Barcelona) and UIC Bilingualism Forum (Chicago) for valuable feedback. This paper owes much to the comments and criticisms of three anonymous expert reviewers. We would also like to express our gratitude to Rachel Klassen and Juana Liceras for supporting this project and for their thorough comments on the last version. All errors are our own

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