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Auteur: Juana LICERAS

Co-Auteur(s): Raquel FERNÁNDEZ FUERTES, University of Valladolid, Spain

Titre:
Subject omission/production in child bilingual English and child bilingual Spanish: The view from linguistic theory


Abstract/Résumé: In bilingual child language acquisition research, a recurrent learnability issue has been to investigate whether and how interlinguistic influence would interact with the non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories (Müller, 1998; Döpke, 2000; Yip & Mathews, 2000; Hulk & Müller, 2000; Paradis, 2001; Nicoladis, 2002; Paradis & Navarro, 2003; Genesee et al., 2005; Serratrice et al., 2009; Fernández Fuertes & Liceras, 2010; Liceras et al., 2010; Liceras et al., 2011, among others). In this paper, we analyze the omission/production of subject pronouns in the developing English grammar and the developing Spanish grammar of two English-Spanish simultaneous bilingual children (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES). We base this analysis on: (i) the divide between two different reformulations of the null subject parameter, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou’s (1998) and Sheehan’s (2006), as pointed out by Martínez (2011); and (ii) Liceras et al.’s assumptions concerning the role of core syntactic phenomena in interlinguistic influence. We specifically aim at providing an answer to the following questions: (1a) What are the patterns of production/omission of English overt and null subjects that appear in the data of these two bilingual children?; (1b) How do these patterns compare with those of the English monolingual child in Sachs corpus in CHILDES?; (1c) Can we infer from those patterns that the default presence of null subjects in Spanish influences bilingual English so that it displays more null subjects and for a longer period of time than monolingual English?; (2a) What are the patterns of production/omission of Spanish overt and null subjects displayed by the two English-Spanish bilingual children?; (2b) How do these patterns compare with those of a Spanish monolingual child, María, from the Ornat corpus in CHILDES?; and (2c) Can we infer from those patterns that the obligatory presence of overt subjects in English influences bilingual Spanish so that it displays more English-like overt subjects and for a longer period of time than monolingual Spanish?