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Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax–pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in English–Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2004

LUDOVICA SERRATRICE
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
ANTONELLA SORACE
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
SANDRA PAOLI
Affiliation:
University of Manchester

Abstract

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and we compared the distribution of subjects and objects in the Italian and English of a bilingual child (1;10–4;6) with that of two groups of MLUw-matched monolinguals. All arguments were coded for syntactic function and for a number of discourse pragmatic features predicted to affect their realisation. Our main prediction was that unidirectional crosslinguistic influence might occur for the English–Italian bilingual child with respect to pronominal subject and object use after the instantiation of the C system. Specifically we predicted that in Italian the bilingual child might use overt pronominal subjects in contexts where monolinguals would use a null subject, and that he might use postverbal strong object pronouns in Italian instead of preverbal weak pronominal clitics. Conversely, we did not expect the overall proportion of overt objects, whether noun phrases or pronouns, to vary crosslinguistically as objects are always obligatorily overt in both languages regardless of discourse pragmatics. Our results confirmed these predictions, and corroborated the argument that crosslinguistic influence may occur in bilingual first language acquisition in specific contexts in which syntax and pragmatics interact.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2004

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Footnotes

This research was supported by an award to the first two authors by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (grant number R000223762). Parts of this paper were presented at the 27th Annual Meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development, and at the Fourth International Symposium on Bilingualism.