Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015

Bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) are documented in various languages and are common in codeswitching between English and South Asian languages. It has been suggested that BCVs have no monolingual equivalent, and are generated by a ‘third system’ independent of the two languages. BCVs have also been cited as evidence of language convergence, and as a strategy employed by dominant bilinguals to circumvent lexical gaps in one language. BCVs were common in narratives from four to six-year-old Panjabi-English children in Huddersfield, UK. BCVs are argued to be based on analogy with Panjabi monolingual compound verbs, and to be unrelated to language convergence or language dominance. Instead, BCV use relates to two types of codeswitching in the data: one utilising the simplest structures from both languages, the other drawing more fully on the two languages’ grammatical resources. It is suggested that BCVs enable children with limited overall bilingual competence to ‘do codeswitching’.

Heritage receptive bilinguals (RBs) are individuals who report understanding but not speaking their family language. This study tests whether semantic features of functional morphemes, namely tense, aspect, and agreement markers, are accessible to them in comprehension. RBs in this study are fluent speakers of English with receptive knowledge of Labrador Inuttitut. Many RBs showed fluent-like comprehension of aspectual suffixes, subject-object-verb agreement suffixes, and past versus future contrasts in tense suffixes, but most could not identify remoteness degrees in tense suffixes. Lowest-proficiency RBs did not show knowledge of any morphemes. Remoteness features are missing from most RBs’ grammars; the same applies to many features in LRBs’ grammars. Some RBs showed inconsistent performance: better than chance, but worse than fluent speakers. The corresponding parts of RBs’ grammars are therefore fluent-like, but access to them is difficult. RBs’ grammars consist of fluent-like parts, parts with reduced access, and incomplete parts.

This paper examines the emergence and acquisition of marked accusative objects (Differential Object Marking, DOM, Bossong, 1991) in the spontaneous production of seven early Spanish-English simultaneous bilinguals (henceforth, 2L1) with different linguistic environments. The main finding is that the 2L1 group examined did not acquire differentially marked objects in the period studied, up to 3;6, nor did they behave similarly to Spanish monolingual children (L1) acquiring DOM (Montrul, 2011; Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, 2008). The current results support previous claims that link protracted development and incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2008; Montrul and Sánchez-Walker, 2013). Tentatively, this study concludes that under reduced input conditions, 2L1 develop core aspects of their language, such as accusative and dative structures, but cannot acquire language-specific properties, such as the acquisition of the [person] feature needed for DOM in Spanish.

The acquisition of the Spanish 5-vowel system by speakers of the 3-vowel language Quechua (/ɪ/-/a/-/ʊ/) seldom results in accurate approximation to Spanish vowel spaces when learning takes place informally in post-adolescence. The present study offers data from a minimal immersion environment in northern Ecuador. In a context in which few cues point to the existence of mid-high vocalic oppositions in Spanish (e.g. no literacy, no corrective feedback, almost no viable minimal pairs), these speakers reliably distinguish only three Spanish vowels in production. These Quechua-dominant bilinguals have amorphous front and back vowel spaces considerably broader than those defining Quechua /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, but with no bimodal clustering. Left relatively unfettered, the hybrid system may contribute to an understanding of the relationship between vowel inventory and vowel space topology.

This study presents a contrastive analysis of 3624 instances of prenominal adjective order retrieved from the Chinese and German sections of the International Corpus of Learner English and the International Corpus of English. The data was annotated for nine determinants of adjective order, including semantic, frequency-related, and articulatory features. Applying a two-step regression procedure called MuPDAR (Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis Using Regressions), the present study finds that overall, the intermediate-advanced level learners are well-aligned with native speakers’ preferences. However, we also see that while the German learners seem generally better aligned with regard to frequency-related factors, the Chinese learners behave more target-like with regard to the effect of adjective gradability, and they seem more sensitive to segmental alternation constraints. In discussing these and other results, the study hopes to illustrate how corpus-based methods can make a valuable contribution to contemporary SLA research, specifically with regard to multifactorially determined phenomena such as adjective order.