Idioma: Español
Fecha: Subida: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+02:00
Duración: 17m 20s
Lugar: Conferencia
Visitas: 830 visitas

The acquisition of English dative constructions by English-Spanish bilinguals

Silvia Sánchez Calderón (Universidad de Educación a Distancia -UNED-)

Descripción

The present proposal aims at giving an answer to the dichotomies that are present in the literature of ditransitive constructions (i.e. double objects and to/for-datives) as far as their derivational syntactic relationship is concerned. It analyzes which ditransitive construction is the source structure from which its ditransitive counterpart is derived. Some linguists argue that to/for-datives are the basic structure from which double object constructions (DOCs) are syntactically transformed (Larson 2014, 1990, 1988). Conversely, other linguists claim that DOCs syntactically derive from to/for-datives (Aoun and Li 1989; Machonis 1985).
On the basis of these previous theoretical accounts, the following predictions could take place when focusing on acquisition data:
Prediction 1. If DOCs (1b) arise syntactically from to/for-datives (1a), then DOCs are expected to appear at an earlier age and have a higher incidence along the acquisition process if compared to to/for-datives. This would be so for 2L1 English children and L1 English children alike.
(1) a. John gave a book to Mary (to-dative)
b. John gave Mary a book (DOC)
Prediction 2. Contrarily, if to/for-datives (1a) are syntactically derived from DOCs (1b), then to/for-datives are expected to appear at an earlier age and have a higher incidence along the acquisition process if compared to DOCs. This would be so for 2L1 English children and L1 English children alike.
Prediction 3. If adult input plays a role in children’s production of ditransitives, then the order of appearance will go hand in hand with the frequency with which a child is exposed to those structures, as argued in the ordered input hypothesis (Borer and Wexler 1987). This would be so for 2L1 English children and L1 English children.
When comparing bilingual and monolingual production, and with respect to the so-called bilingual effect, bilinguals, because of the burden of acquiring two languages, may lag behind their monolingual counterparts. However, the order of appearance of to/for-datives and DOCS is expected to coincide in the production of both child groups. In order to address these issues, we analyze bilingual English data and monolingual English data from corpora available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). We consider both children’s utterances and child-directed speech.
Our results show that DOCs are the basic structure from which to/for-datives are derived since (a) DOCs begin to be produced earlier and they have a higher incidence along the acquisition process if compared to to/for-datives and (b) there is a narrow correspondence between the high adult input frequency and the earlier appearance of DOCs and between the low adult input frequency and the later appearance of to/for-datives, regardless of the language group. This is so for monolingual and bilingual data alike. Therefore, 2L1 English children behave like L1 English in the acquisition of ditransitives.

Propietarios

Congreso Cilc 2021

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Serie: CILC2021: Los corpus y la adquisición y enseñanza del lenguaje / Corpora, LA and teaching (+información)