Article
Overt subjects and copula
omission in the Spanish and
the English grammar of
English–Spanish bilinguals:
On the locus and directionality
of interlinguistic influence
FIRST
LANGUAGE
First Language
32(1-2) 88­–115
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0142723711403980
fla.sagepub.com
Juana M. Liceras
University of Ottawa, Canada
Raquel Fernández Fuertes
Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
Anahí Alba de la Fuente
University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
The presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories
has occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition
research. In bilingual acquisition a central learnability issue has been to determine
whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns. In this article,
the authors analyse the omission/production of subject pronouns in the developing
Spanish grammar and of copula be in the developing English grammar of two English–
Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the issues of the locus and
directionality of interlinguistic influence. The authors argue that the directionality of
interlinguistic influence is determined by the need to implement core operations of the
computational system and that the lexical–semantic interface is an area of the grammar
where interlinguistic influence occurs.
Corresponding Author:
Juana M. Liceras, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Ottawa, 70 Laurier East,
Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: jliceras@uottawa.ca
Liceras et al.
89
Keywords
copula omission, interlinguistic influence, L1 bilingual acquisition, lexicon–semantics
interface, overt subjects
Introduction
The presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories has
occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition
research. However, while in monolingual acquisition research the core learnability issue
addressed has been whether those patterns had to be given a competence or a processing
account, in bilingual acquisition the central learnability issue has been to determine
whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns.
In this article, we identify two different areas of the grammar which could be the locus
of interlinguistic influence between English and Spanish: influence from Spanish into
English regarding copula omission in bilingual English and influence from English into
Spanish regarding the overproduction of subject pronouns in bilingual Spanish. What we
hypothesize is that only in the case of copula omission might there be such an influence.
We have chosen to investigate these two cases of potential influence, even though there
are two other logical possibilities that could be investigated: (i) the influence of English
into Spanish regarding copula omission in bilingual Spanish; and (ii) the influence of
Spanish into English in terms of the overproduction of null subjects in bilingual English.1
We are not going to address these two possibilities here, even though our proposal makes
predictions in terms of both the locus and the directionality of influence in these two
instances too.
In what follows, we discuss a series of studies which have dealt, on the one hand, with
the directionality of interlinguistic influence in the production of overt and null subjects
in bilinguals and, on the other, with the locus of influence with respect to the copula
omission patterns in bilinguals compared to monolinguals. In the second section, we
draw from Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou’s (1998) account of the null subject parameter to provide an analysis of the production and omission of subjects at three stages in
the acquisition of English by Simon and Leo, two bilingual twins (FerFuLice corpus in
CHILDES)2. We compare the twins’ data to Paradis and Navarro’s (2003) data from a
bilingual child and two monolingual children and to Bel’s (2001) data from three monolingual Spanish children in order to show that the production of overt subjects in Spanish
by our bilingual twins does not provide evidence that there is influence from English. We
then proceed to compare these same data with the data provided by Becker (2004) to
argue that copula omission in monolingual English should be accounted for as a grammatical reflex because it is dependent on the individual-level vs. the stage-level predicate
classes. We show that the copula omission patterns in bilingual English are different
from those of monolingual English and argue that influence from Spanish can explain
these differences. Based on the data analysed in the second and third sections, in section
four we discuss the issue of the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence and
address other issues that are raised by our discussion.
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First Language 32(1-2)
The directionality of interlinguistic influence and the production
of null and overt subjects in bilingual Spanish
The debate on whether the omission of subjects in monolingual child language acquisition is to be accounted for syntactically (Bel, 2001; Hyams, 1986, 1996; Hyams & Wexler,
1993; Rizzi, 1993/4, 1994; Wang, Lillo-Martin, Best, & Levitt, 1992; Weissenborn, 1992)
or is the result of a processing deficit (Valian, 1991; Valian & Eisenberg, 1996) has been
extrapolated to copula omission by Becker (2000, 2004). However, in the case of child
bilingual acquisition, the competence/processing debate has been overshadowed by the
issue of interlinguistic influence. Specifically, it has been argued that while interlinguistic influence occurs in the case of simultaneous bilingual acquisition in the phonological
(Paradis, 2001), morphological (Nicoladis, 2002) and syntactic (Döpke, 2000; Genesee,
Nicoladis, & Paradis, 1995; Müller, 1998; Yip & Matthews, 2000) domains, it is the
syntax–pragmatics interface that has been identified as being particularly vulnerable.
In fact, according to Hulk and Müller (2000), two conditions are required for interlinguistic interference to take place: that the structure in question be located at the syntax–
pragmatics interface and that the language which is influenced contain structures that
may be misanalysed as mirroring those of the influencing language. Specifically, Hulk
and Müller (2000) propose that object omission occurs at a high rate in the French of
child French–German bilinguals because (i) omission in German is governed at the
syntax–pragmatics interface and (ii) because French clitic constructions may be analysed
as instances of object omission by the bilingual child.
Following a similar line of reasoning, and given the fact that the production of overt
subjects in Spanish is governed at the syntax–pragmatics interface, and that overt subjects are available in the input data, it has been suggested that interlinguistic influence
from English might lead to an overproduction of overt subjects by Spanish–English
bilinguals (Paradis & Navarro, 2003). Notice however that, in this case, it is in the potentially ‘influenced’ language (Spanish) where the production of overt subjects is governed
at the syntax–pragmatics interface, not in the ‘influencing’ language (German) as in Hulk
and Müller’s initial proposal. In other words, to the best of our knowledge, the issue of
directionality in relation to the locus of the processes regulated by the syntax–pragmatics
interface has not been addressed. If the hypothesis is that directionality à la Hulk and
Müller will result in interlinguistic influence, a larger production of overt subjects would
not be hypothesized because overt subjects in English – the ‘influencing’ language – are
licensed by the computational component of the grammar. In other words, they are the
result of a core syntax operation and, according to this hypothesis, core syntax operations
are not involved in interlinguistic influence. As for evidence that would lead to interpret
superficial Spanish input as requiring overt subjects, the lack of expletives or the presence of null subjects in subordinate clauses, together with the general presence of verbal
pronominal morphemes, might provide evidence to discard such an analysis. A similar
conclusion would be reached in the case of the production of null subjects in the English
of English–Spanish bilinguals, in that bilingual English would not evidence more null
subjects than monolingual English due to influence from Spanish: first, because licensing null subjects is also an operation of the computational component of the grammar;3
second, because it is far from clear that English would provide robust superficial input
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Liceras et al.
which could be misanalysed as mirroring the Spanish structures where null subjects are
licensed, since, in English, null subjects with inflected verbs only occur with coordinated
structures. However, as we have indicated above, investigating the production of null
subjects by the twins to determine whether it is different from that of monolinguals is an
issue that we will not pursue here.
The locus of interlinguistic influence: Copula omission
in bilingual English
Besides addressing the issue of directionality of influence taking into account Hulk and
Müller’s (2000) conditions, we would also like to address the issue of the locus of influence. Recently, Serratrice, Sorace, Filiaci, and Baldo (2009) have pointed out that the
syntax–lexicon interface and the syntax–semantics interface are also vulnerable domains.
In this article, we would like to propose that the lexicon–semantics interface may also be
an area of interlinguistic influence and that the directionality of influence would be determined by the language that is more transparent in terms of the lexical realization of a
given semantic distinction. Thus, with respect to copula omission in child grammars,
which according to Becker (2000, 2004) should be accounted for as a grammatical
reflex, we would like to propose that linguistic interference might also take place when
languages (English and Spanish in this case) differ in terms of the lexical realization of
the two different types of predicates: nominal or individual-level predicates as in (1), and
locative or stage-level predicates as in (2):
(1) Mommy IS a girl
(2) My pen IS down there
What (1) and (2) show is that, in the case of English, the same lexical item (IS) occurs
with both types of predication while, in Spanish, nominal predicates are realized as SER,
as in (3), and locative predicates are realized as ESTAR, as in (4):
(3) (4) Mamá ES una chica
‘Mommy is a girl’
Mi lápiz ESTÁ ahí debajo
‘My pen is down there’
Becker (2000, 2004) shows that the omission of copula be by monolingual English children in the case of nominal predicates, as in the examples in (5), is significantly lower
than in the case of locative predicates, as in (6):4
(5) (6) a. This is lady b. Patsy’s a girl a. Lady (is) on that
b. I (am) in the kitchen [(Naomi, 2;02), Sachs, 1983]
[(Peter, 2;03), Bloom, 1970]
[(Nina, 2;02), Suppes, 1974]
[(Nina, 2;01), Suppes, 1974]
This author argues that, rather than being a product of sentence length, the differences in
the use of overt copula be vs. null copula be in child English are determined by the
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First Language 32(1-2)
semantic nature of the predicate: copula omission is possible with locative predicates
because the prepositional phrase in (6) has aspectual value and it is the aspectual phrase
that provides temporal anchoring to the sentence (Guéron & Hoekstra, 1995). This
results in the possibility of using null be with these types of predicates. However, nominal predicates, like the noun phrase in (5), are not aspectual and, therefore, copula be
must be explicit to ensure temporal anchoring. Thus, child grammar differs from adult
grammar in that, in the case of the former, an aspectual phrase can provide temporal
anchoring, while the latter always needs an inflectional phrase.
As for copula be with adjective predicates, as in (7) and (8), they can be considered
locative or nominal (stage-level or individual-level predicates, following Carlson’s
[1977] and Schmitt & Miller’s [2007] terminology) depending on the type of adjective
and on the context. Thus, (7) would contain a nominal/individual-level predicate while
(8) would contain a locative/stage-level predicate:
(7) Elmo is blue [(Simon, 2;05), FerFuLice]
(8) I (am) hungry [(Leo, 2;11), FerFuLice]
The results of Becker’s (2004) analysis with respect to the differences between the two
types of adjective predicates were less clear-cut than in the case of nominal and locative
predicates and there were important individual differences among the four children.
However, the individual-level predicate (7) vs. the stage-level predicate (8) dichotomy
still paralleled the pattern found in the case of nominal vs. locative predicates in that
more instances of omission occurred with the latter.
One could argue that, if this is the case for child English grammar, it should also be
the case for any monolingual child grammar. However, according to Becker (2000), and
also as shown by Sera (1992) and Bel (2001), instances of copula omission in monolingual Spanish and monolingual Catalan (Bel, 2001) are very scarce. Furthermore, even if
copula selection with adjectives emerges more slowly than with nominal and locative
predicates, it is not only that copula omission is scarce but also that there seem to be few
errors of copula choice (Silva-Corvalán & Montanari, 2008). Therefore, it seems to be
the case that only monolingual English data, but not monolingual Spanish data, display
the patterns of omission found by Becker.
Going back to the case of bilingual children and to the possible influence that one
language can have on the other, we would like to suggest that the fact that the ser vs. estar
distinction forces the bilingual child to organize conceptual properties and attributions
around the two lexical items (Sera, 2008) may spearhead the lexical realization of copula
be not only with locative or stage-level predicates but also with nominal or individuallevel predicates. If this is the case, the patterns of omission found by Becker in the monolingual English grammar will not occur in the case of the bilingual English grammar.
Subject omission in child language
It is a well-established fact that the omission of null subjects in child language occurs
both in [+null subject] languages where it is the grammatical option, as in the Spanish
examples (9a)–(9c), and in [–null subject] languages such as English where the null subjects in (10a) to (10c) are ungrammatical in the adult language:
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Liceras et al.
(9) (10) a. No puedo subir ‘(I) cannot go upstairs’
b. Ahora hacemos esto ‘Now (we) do that’
c. Hacieron un canción del lobo ‘(They) made a song about the wolf’
a. (It) roars b. (I) falled [=fell] c. (He) chased (Leo, 2;05)
(Simon, 3;00)
(Leo, 3;00)
(Simon, 2;05)
(Simon, 2;06)
(Leo, 2;06)
While the distribution of null/overt subjects in early child Spanish (or any other null
subject language) may differ from that of the adult language, as has been found to be the
case with non-native speakers, heritage speakers and speakers in specific contact situations (Montrul & Rodríguez-Louro, 2006; Rothman, 2009), it has been the overproduction of overt subjects that has been identified as an area of clear interlinguistic influence
(Liceras, 1988; Montrul, 2004; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). In other words, even if it may be
the case that child null subject data contain instances of null subjects that are not identified under the pragmatics and discourse conditions laid out for adult data (i.e. nonambiguous agreement when there is a switch of referent), it is the overproduction of
overt subjects that has been singled out as an area of potential interlinguistic influence,
following Hulk and Müller’s (2000) proposal. For instance, Paradis and Navarro (2003)
investigate whether interference from English or the type of input Manuela is exposed to
would account for her subject production (see also Larrañaga & Guijarro Fuentes, this
issue; Zdorenko & Paradis, this issue). Manuela is an English–Spanish bilingual child
who was exposed to the Cuban Spanish spoken by one of her parents and, given the fact
that the use of overt subjects, specifically subject pronouns in Caribbean Spanish, is
more abundant than in the case of other varieties of Spanish, Paradis and Navarro (2003)
cannot conclude whether it is this specific type of input or interlinguistic influence that
accounts for Manuela’s larger production of overt subjects when compared to the production of monolingual children. In fact, in Liceras, Fernández Fuertes, and Pérez Tattam
(2008), we suggest that, in the production of null and overt subjects by Simon and Leo
(FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES), there is no indication of explicit subject overuse. Since
these twins were exposed to peninsular Spanish, it may well be the case that Manuela’s
overuse of overt subjects be a consequence of the type of input that she was exposed to,
rather than of interference from English. Here, we carry out a comparison of these bilingual data and monolingual data in order to provide further evidence that interference
from English does not lead to overuse of explicit subjects in bilingual Spanish.
Null and overt subjects in English and Spanish: A minimalist account
Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (1998) reformulate the null subject parameter in relation to EPP (extended projection principle) checking, which implies that the way in
which the EPP feature is checked will determine whether a language is a pro-drop or a
non-pro-drop language. These authors adopt Speas’s (1994) account of the distribution
of null NPs in terms of economy principles and propose that a given head is projected
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First Language 32(1-2)
TP
VP
T
V’
DP
D
Pedii mosj
[mosj]
V
[pedii]
DP
el alto el fuego
Figure 1.
TP
T’
DP
VP
T
V’
DP
V
Wei
[wei ]
asked for
DP
a cease fire
Figure 2.
only if it has semantic and phonological content, as well as Rohrbacher’s (1992)
generalization according to which ‘strong morphemes have individual lexical entries
in the numeration while weak morphemes do not’ (Speas, 1994, p. 185). This implies
that, in Spanish, checking of the EPP feature occurs by merging the verb with the DP
morpheme (Xº movement), as shown in (11) and Figure 1:
(11) Pedimos el alto el fuego
Ask for1st person plural the cease to the fire
This proposal further implies that Spanish verbal agreement affixes are in fact pronominal elements which have a categorial feature [+D] listed in the numeration along with the
verbal root. Furthermore, the Spanish bound morphemes or affixal personal markers
that appear postverbally such as –mos in (11) have semantic content and are therefore
[+interpretable].
In English, the checking of the EPP feature takes place by merging an overt pronominal element with the Spec-TP position where the DP moves (XP movement), as shown in
(12) and Figure 2:
(12) We asked for a cease fire
What this implies is that semantic features are associated with subject pronouns but not
with affixes, which are [–interpretable]. In other words, in contrast with [+null subject]
languages, in [–null subject] languages such as English, verbal agreement affixes (the
3rd person singular –s) are weak and, consequently, cannot be characterized as pronominal elements.
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Liceras et al.
AP
DP
TP
T’
VP
T
V’
DP
V
Nosotros
pedij mosi
[mosi ]
[pedij ]
DP
un alto el fuego
Figure 3.
Thus, under this proposal, it is the Spanish pronominal [+interpretable] agreement
affixes that are the equivalent of the English pronominals, while Spanish pronominal
overt subjects, which are used to convey a semantic or pragmatic effect as in (13), are
said to occupy a focus position (Fernández Soriano, 1989; Kato, 1999; Ordóñez, 1997),
as shown in (14) and Figure 3:
(13) (14) Ellos no piden un alto el fuego pero nosotros sí
They not ask a cease to the fire but we yes
‘They are not asking for a cease fire but we are’
Nosotros pedimos un alto el fuego
‘We are asking for a cease fire’
The Spanish pronoun nosotros (we) in (14) is not moved from the Spec-VP position as
the English pronoun we but rather it is merged to that focus position which we have
labelled A (adjunct) following Kato (1999).
Based on these differences between the two languages, we compare the overall production of overt and null subjects by children who were acquiring English and Spanish
simultaneously (L1 English–L1 Spanish simultaneous bilinguals) and three children who
were acquiring Spanish (L1 Spanish monolinguals) as follows: (i) data from the three
simultaneous bilingual children: a set of twins, Simon and Leo (Liceras et al., 2008),
and Manuela (Paradis & Navarro, 2003); and (ii) data from three monolingual Spanish
children: María, Emilio and Juan (Bel, 2001; Paradis & Navarro, 2003).5
Null vs. overt subjects in the Spanish of English–Spanish bilinguals
Simon and Leo are identical twins who were born in Spain in 1998. The parents, who
adopted the one parent one language way of interacting with the children, were from
Spain (the father) and from the United States (the mother). The children stayed mainly
with the mother, who was their primary caregiver during the first three years of their
lives.6 We obtained spontaneous production data from February 2000 until November
2005. Out of the 307 video-taped files, 119 are in Spanish, 183 are in English and 5 are
bilingual.
We present here Simon and Leo’s production of Spanish null and overt subjects at
three different stages determined both by age and MLU (mean length utterance), as
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First Language 32(1-2)
Table 1. Data selection from Simon and Leo; Spanisha
Stage
Age
Transcriptions
Stage 1
[May-June 2001]
Stage 2
[January-October 2002]
Stage 3
[April-November 2003]
2;04-2;06
21, 22, 23, 24A
3;01-3;09
28, 34A, 38E
4;04-4;11
50, 51, 54, 56B
aAdapted
from Liceras et al. (2008, Table 5.1, p. 121).
Table 2. Total number of utterances and MLUwa,b in Spanish
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Total
aThe
Simon
Leo
Total
510 [1.43]
654 [3.77]
1135 [4.28]
2299
529 [1.48]
756 [3.35]
894 [3.88]
2179
1039
1410
2029
4478
figures in brackets refer to the MLUw.
from Liceras et al. (2008, Table 5.2, p. 121).
bAdapted
Table 3. Percentage of null vs. overt subjects with inflected verbs (Simon and Leo); Spanish dataa
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Null
Overt
% overt
Null
Overt
% overt
Null
Overt
% overt
173
33
(16)
701
251
(26.4)
698
259
(27.1)
aAdapted
from Liceras et al. (2008, Table 5.7, p. 128).
shown in Tables 1 and 2. These stages are justified in terms of both the age and the
MLU differences. The MLU was calculated on the number of words per utterance
(MLUw).7
The total number of utterances included in the study as well as the corresponding
MLUws for the three stages are shown in Table 2, which shows that Simon and Leo’s
total production of utterances and MLUws in Spanish are very similar.
The total percentages of overt vs. null subjects produced by the twins are shown in
Table 3. It can be observed that the percentage of overt subjects is only 16% in the first
stage and less than 30% in both stages 2 and 3. In fact, even though the increase in the
production of inflected verbs (and therefore null and overt subjects) from stage 1 to stage
2 is significant (p = .0087), the actual increase of overt vs. null subjects is not significant.
This is exactly what is expected in the development of a null subject language like
Spanish, which in the case of the twins, and mirroring monolingual development of the
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Liceras et al.
Table 4. Percentage of null vs. overt subjects with inflected verbs (Simon and Leo); English dataa
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Null
Overt
% overt
Null
Overt
% overt
Null
Overt
% overt
34
16
(32)
12
266
(95.5)
39
837
(95.5)
aAdapted
from Liceras et al. (2008, Table 5.7, p. 128).
Table 5. Children’s ages and MLUw, Spanisha, b
Manuela (bilingual)
Emilio (monolingual
María (monolingual)
Age
MLUw
1;09-2;06
1;08-2;07
1;08-1;11
[1.26]-[2.08]
[1.20]-[2.12]
[1.99]-[2.07]
aAdapted
bIn
from Paradis and Navarro (2003, Table 1, p. 378).
Paradis and Navarro (2003), the child from López-Ornat’s corpus, María, is referred to as L.
two languages, proceeds very differently from English, where the percentages of overt
vs. null subjects in the three stages are quite distinct, as shown in Table 4.
The fact that there is no abrupt change from stage 1 to stage 2 in the case of Spanish
shows that the null subject parameter is set earlier in Spanish than in English and it also
shows, as we are going to demonstrate below, that English does not influence Spanish
in terms of the total number of overt Spanish subjects produced by the twins when
compared with the Spanish monolingual children.
Paradis and Navarro (2003) analyse the production of overt subjects by Manuela, a
simultaneous bilingual child (Deuchar & Quay, 2000) who had a Spanish-speaking
father from Cuba and an English-speaking mother from the UK. The parents spoke
Spanish to Manuela and to each other, and Manuela received English input from the
maternal grandmother and the caretakers. They compare Manuela’s production to that of
María (López-Ornat’s corpus in CHILDES) and Emilio (Vila’s corpus in CHILDES),
two monolingual children who grew up in Spain. The fact that Manuela is exposed to the
Caribbean variety of Spanish, where null subjects are known to be overused in comparison to the Castilian and other varieties, leads Paradis and Navarro (2003) to analyse not
only the percentages of overt vs. null subjects produced by the children but also those
produced by the adults who interact with them. This is in order to determine whether this
type of input or English will influence Manuela’s production of Spanish overt subjects
and make it different from that of the monolingual children.8 The data from Manuela,
Emilio and María analysed by Paradis and Navarro (2003) comprise the ages and MLUws
shown in Table 5.
The first thing that we have to note is that these children’s MLUws fall between the
first and the third stages of the twins’ data (Table 2). The second thing is that the initial
recordings for these children cover a younger age than the one covered by the first stage
of the twins’ data. However, in addition to providing a table with the total overall production of null and overt subjects by the three children from the first to the last recording,
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First Language 32(1-2)
Table 6. Manuela, Emilio and María’s percentage of overt and null subjects across all transcriptsa
Manuela (bilingual)
Emilio (monolingual)
María (monolingual)
aAdapted
Null
%
Overt
%
152
289
123
64.68
83.05
79.87
83
59
31
35.32
16.95
20.13
from Paradis and Navarro (2003, Table 2, p. 380).
Paradis and Navarro (2003) offer a description (and a chart) of the actual development,
which allows us to discuss the development of both the twins’ production and these children’s production.
The totals of the null and overt subject pronouns produced by Manuela, Emilio and
María (Table 6) show that the production of overt subjects by the two monolingual children was at 20% (María) and less than 20% (Emilio), while in the case of Manuela it
reached a total of 35.32%. Paradis and Navarro conclude that only the monolingual children’s production falls within the range observed for that age by other monolingual children from null subject languages and refers the reader to Grinstead (1998, 2000), Allen
(2000) and Allen and Schröder (2003).
The first thing we should note is that if we collapse the twins’ data from the first and
the second stages, their percentage of overt pronouns would also fall closer to 20%.
Furthermore, monolingual data provided by Bel (2001) for three Spanish and three
Catalan monolingual children for periods that cover larger age spans than those used
by Paradis and Navarro (2003), where data from Emilio and María are also included
(Table 7), show that the percentages of overt pronouns produced by the monolinguals
are even higher than those of Simon and Leo’s, as shown in Table 8.
The above data show that the percentages of overt subjects produced by the bilingual
twins at all three stages are lower than the totals produced by these monolingual children.9 However, Manuela’s percentage is higher than the average for these children and
higher than the percentages for the individual children except for Juan.10 The difference
between Manuela’s percentages and those of these children is considerably smaller than
Table 7. Children, age ranges, data sources and languagea
Child
Language
Data source
Age range
Julia
Pep
Gisela
María
Emilio
Juan
Catalan
Catalan
Catalan
Spanish
Spanish
Spanish
Bel (2001)
Serra-Solé (CHILDES)
Serra-Solé (CHILDES)
López-Ornat (CHILDES)
Vila (CHILDES)
Linaza (CHILDES)
1;7.19-2;6.25
1;6.23-3;0.27
1;7.14-3;0.29
1;7-2;6
1;8.13-2;11.24
1;7.2-2;10.21
aAdapted
from Bel (2001, Tables 1 and 2, p. 77).
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Liceras et al.
Table 8. Production of null and overt subjectsa
Catalan children
Total no. of
sentences
Null
%
Overt
%
Gisela
Julia
Pep
Total
492
379
853
1724
337
255
576
1168
68.5
67.3
67.5
67.7
153
124
277
554
31.5
32.7
32.5
32.3
Spanish children
Total no. of
sentences
Null
%
Overt
%
María
Emilio
Juan
Total
1545
671
204
2420
1027
484
119
1630
66.4
72.1
58.3
67.3
518
187
85
790
33.6
27.9
41.7
32.7
aAdapted
from Bel (2001, Table 5, p. 295).
those reported by Paradis and Navarro (2003), although we have to take into account that
the age spans covered by Bel (2001) are larger.
We have then shown that the production of Spanish overt subjects by Simon and Leo
does not provide evidence that English may influence their Spanish. This reinforces the
hypothesis that Manuela’s input data may account for the higher percentage of overt
pronouns found in her spontaneous speech. Direct evidence that this may be the case
comes from two pieces of information provided by Paradis and Navarro (2003) themselves. The first one is that while Manuela’s frequency of overt subject use seemed to
move closer to that of the monolinguals by age 2;6, the discourse pragmatic contexts of
Manuela’s overt subject use was ‘strikingly different from monolinguals even at age 2;6’
(Paradis & Navarro, 2003, p. 384). In other words, exposure to Cuban Spanish (and nonnative Spanish from her mother) may account for this difference (see also Schmitz,
Patuto, & Müller, this issue). The second piece of information comes from the percentages of production of overt subjects by Manuela’s parents (60%), in comparison to those
of the monolingual children’s parents, which range between 35% and 40% (Paradis &
Navarro, 2003, Table 4, p. 382). But more important than this is the fact that while the
percentage of Manuela’s father’s overt subject pronouns was similar to that of Emilio’s
and María’s parents (around 40%), the majority of overt subjects in Manuela’s mother’s
speech were overt subject pronouns (53%). This is interesting because non-native input
may play a more important role here than input from the Cuban variety of Spanish.
However, while it is difficult to determine at which point in the development of Manuela’s
Spanish the type of input she received might have played a role in her production, it is a
fact that the overall input that she received in terms of the percentage of overt subjects
produced by her parents was different from that of the monolingual children, since there
was a significant difference between Manuela’s parents and Emilio’s mother. This contrasts with the fact that there were no significant differences between the overall percentage of overt subjects produced by Manuela’s mother and father.11
100
First Language 32(1-2)
Based on the above we can conclude that neither the twins’ data nor Manuela’s data
provide evidence that English influences the production of overt subject pronouns in the
Spanish of these bilinguals.
Copula omission in child language:
Monolingual vs. bilingual data
Copula omission has not been identified so far as an area of interlinguistic influence as
such, even though there are languages where the copula is absent either in some tenses
or altogether.12 Thus, in principle, one could only predict possible interlinguistic influence when there is absence vs. presence, as in the case of object drop which leads Hulk
and Müller’s (2000) proposal. However, in the case of two languages where the copula
is always realized, such as English and Spanish, the difference lies in the fact that it is not
lexically realized in the same way since, as we indicated earlier, in English, the two
semantic values – states and qualities – are expressed with copula be, while in Spanish,
qualities are realized as ser and states as estar. This scenario is very different indeed
from the one presented by the distribution of null and overt subjects in languages such as
Spanish, but it implies that the semantic distinction has to be identified via a lexical
choice which is semantically determined. This means that we could, in principle, investigate whether the fact that English does not have this distinction would result in a delay
in the differentiation in Spanish in comparison with their monolingual counterparts. In
fact, Silva-Corvalán and Montanari (2008) show that even though copular construction
develops autonomously in the Spanish of Nico, a Spanish–English bilingual child, there
is a delay in the acquisition of estar which they interpret as a possible type of influence
from English. However, it is also the case that Nico uses incorrect copulas (he appears to
overgeneralize estar, as Sera [2008] puts it), a usage that has also been detected in the
case of Spanish monolingual children (Sera, 1992; Sera, Gathje, & Castillo, 1999). Sera
(2008) attributes this to the fact that ‘bilinguals learning ser/estar must learn to accommodate different organizations of properties across different languages’ (p. 362). While
influence in this direction may occur, a comparison of actual patterns between children’s
monolingual and bilingual Spanish is still to be undertaken.
What we would like to explore here is whether being exposed to Spanish and therefore having clear-cut evidence for differentiating state from quality predicates will influence the patterns of copula omission that have been noticed in children’s monolingual
English (Becker, 2000, 2004). The rationale for investigating this area of interlinguistic
influence and in this specific direction (from Spanish into English) is two-fold. First, if
we interpret Hulk and Müller’s (2000) requirements with some degree of freedom, influence of Spanish copula realization in the patterns of copula omission in bilingual English
could be expected because the locus of the two-way lexical realization of Spanish copula is at the lexicon–semantics (and also syntactic as we will see) interface; and, second,
because the two types of predication have to be overtly realized in English too, which
implies that children are always exposed to input containing instances of copula be and
the awareness provided by Spanish ser/estar would enhance the production of be.
Evidence that copula omission occurs at very low rates in monolingual Catalan (Bel,
2001), in monolingual Spanish (Becker, 2000; Bel, 2001) and in bilingual Spanish
101
Liceras et al.
(Gaulin, 2008) would also lead us to hypothesize that Spanish may influence the copula
omission patterns in the English of the bilingual child.
Types of predicates
Carlson (1977) and also Marín Gálvez (2000) differentiate between stage-level (SL)
predicates and individual-level (IL) predicates as being the realization of two different
types of sentences: sentences with a generic value where a property is attributed directly
to the individual, as in (15), and sentences with a non-generic value where a property is
attributed directly to a temporal aspect (stage) of the individual, as in (16):
(15) a. Mommy is a lady
b. Mommy is tall
(16) a. My doggy is in the toy-box
b. My doggy is hungry
IL predicates can be noun phrases, as in (1) and (3) earlier, or (15a), or adjectival phrases
with adjectives depicting size, as tall in (15b), colour (white), aesthetic or physical properties (pretty, hard, soft), etc. SL predicates are locatives depicted as adverbial phrases,
as in (2) and (4) above, or prepositional phrases, as in (16a). They can also be adjectival
phrases which depict temperature (hot), emotions (angry) or physical sensations such as
hungry in (16b).
This semantic difference corresponds to a syntactic difference in that IL predicates
are non-aspectual while SL predicates are aspectual (Kratzer, 1995; Lema, 1995; Luján,
1981; Schmitt, 1992).13 Specifically, Kratzer (1995) proposes that IL predicates are
predicated directly of the thematic subject while SL predicates are predicated of an
event.14 Becker (2000) summarizes the various analyses by proposing the structures in
Figures 4 and 5 for IL and SL predicates, respectively.
SC in both Figures 4 and 5 stands for small clause, the structural account of copula be
as a raising verb that takes a small clause as a complement.15
IP
spec
I’
I
AspP
Asp’
spec
Asp
spec
EvP = event argument
Ev’
SC
Ev
DP
Johni
Figure 4. is
[+/– perf]
ti
PP
in the garden
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First Language 32(1-2)
IP
I’
spec
SC
I
DP
Johni
is
ti
DP
a man
Figure 5. Source: Example (36b), from Becker (2000, p. 113).
The aspectual nature of SL predicates has led Becker (2000) to propose that children
can rely on the aspectual phrase to provide temporal anchoring to clauses, which implies
that their grammar is different from the adult grammar and accounts for the fact that they
omit copula be with SL predicates at a significantly higher rate than they omit copula be
with IL predicates. Becker’s (2000) proposal stems from Guéron and Hoekstra’s (1995)
temporal anchoring requirement which states that temporal anchoring, a formal binding
relation between a tense operator (TOP) in the C-domain and a syntactic tense or aspect
node in the main clause, has to be established to anchor the utterance to the discourse, as
shown in (17):
(17) CP … TOPi … TensePi … VP
This requirement has been argued to be obligatory for main clauses in adult grammar.
Becker (2000) proposes that a main clause is temporally anchored if a (particular)
syntactic head is bound by the tense operator (TOP) in C, as shown in (18):
(18) CP … TOPi … TensePi … AspPi … VP
In other words, the requirement for (main clause) temporal anchoring is satisfied by
either (19a) or (19b):
(19) a. TOP binds Asp
b. TOP binds Tense
Since temporal anchoring can be satisfied by (19a) in child grammars, SL predicates will
not require explicit be, and copula omission will occur with this type of predicates, as
shown in Figure 6.
However, since IL predicates are not aspectual, the AspP category is not realized and
be has to be present to provide temporal anchoring to the sentence, which implies that be
has to be overt, as shown in Figure 7.
Therefore, this implies that, in child grammars, there will be a correlation between
type of predicate (IL/SL) and copula omission. In fact, what Becker’s (2000, 2004)
English monolingual data show is that this is precisely the case.
103
Liceras et al.
IP
EvP: event argument
SC: small clause
I’
spec
I
AspP
Asp’
spec
Asp
[+/– perf]
EvP
Ev’
spec
SC
Ev
PP
DP
ti
My doggyi (is)
in the toy-box
Figure 6. IP
I’
spec
SC
I
Mommyi
is
DP
DP
ti
a lady
Figure 7. Copula omission in children’s monolingual and bilingual English
Becker (2004) provides a revised analysis of Becker’s (2000) study on spontaneous
English monolingual data from four children (Adam, Nina, Naomi and Peter) from
different corpora in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). In order to determine whether
children omit the copula in sentences with prepositional phrase (PP) predicates because
those utterances are longer than utterances with NP predicates, Becker (2004) carries
out an analysis of copular utterances in words, counting only non-copula words and
separating utterances by predicate type. She states that a log-linear model of utterances
separated by predicate type revealed that there were on average 1.17 times as many
(non-copula) words in children’s SL predicate utterances as in their IL utterances, a difference that was significant (Becker, 2004, p. 162). However, she found no main effect
of copula overtness on utterance length, neither when predicate type was taken into
account nor when it was not taken into account. She also found that there was no significant interaction effect between predicate type and copula overtness. This was also
the case for copular utterances with adjective-SL and adjective-IL predicates. Becker
(2004) concludes that a processing account does not explain the patterns of omission
that she found, while the competence-based account whereby the temporal anchoring
requirement can be satisfied by the aspectual phrase in children’s grammar does.
The fact that this pattern of omission seems to be constrained by syntactic principles
could lead us to the conclusion that this should apply to all languages. However, this does
not need to be the case. For instance, as has been repeatedly shown in the case of the root
infinitive (RI) phenomenon, the RI stage is robust in [–null subject] languages but not in
[+null subject] languages (Guasti, 1994; Hyams, 2001; Rizzi, 1994; Salustri & Hyams,
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First Language 32(1-2)
Table 9. Copula omission in Bel’s (2001) Spanish and Catalan data
ser
Total
estar
Omission
Overt
Null
Overt
Null
Overt
Null
Ratio
Spanish
Catalan
319
289
4
31
269
126
0
3
688
415
4
34
0.006%
8%
2003, 2006; Schaeffer & Ben-Shalom, 2004; among others).16 By the same token, copula
omission may be a robust phenomenon in English-like languages but not in other languages. In fact, Sera (1992) found that children correctly used ser with IL predications
and estar with SL predications, although they sometimes overextended the use of estar
to locatives which expressed the location of an event, as in (20), which requires ser in
adult Spanish:
(20) Mi cumpleaños está en mayo [(Nico, 2;7.26), Silva-Corvalán & Montanari, 2008]
My birthday is in May
So, on the one hand, there seems to be enough evidence, as we have indicated above, that
in languages such as Catalan (Bel, 2001) and Spanish (Bel, 2001; Sera, 1992), copula
omission is far from being a robust phenomenon. While Bel (2001) does not include
specific numbers, she has provided us (Table 9) with a detailed counting of the total
production and omission of copula for the three Spanish and the three Catalan children
in her 2001 study.17
In Spanish, ser was only omitted four times and estar none. In the case of Catalan,
there were 34 instances of copula omission, 31 were instances of ser and 3 of estar, a
very noticeable difference which happens to go in the opposite direction of Becker’s
(2004) findings in terms of the type of predicate; namely, the Spanish children do not
omit estar (SL predicates) at all and the Catalan children omit ser at a much higher rate
than estar.
Hypotheses. Considering the existence of a lexical item that realizes IL predicates
and one which realizes SL predicates in Spanish, the insignificant or very scarce omission of copula which has been detected in child monolingual Spanish and in child
monolingual Catalan, together with the fact that the locus of copula realization is at the
syntax(semantics)–lexicon interface and that children receive abundant input as to the
lexical realization of the copula in English, we formulated the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1. Lexical transparency does not cause interlinguistic influence. If this is
the case, copula omission patterns will be similar in English monolingual and English
bilingual data.
Hypothesis 2. Lexical transparency in one language has a facilitating influence in the
other language. If lexicalization with estar makes the SL/IL syntactic–semantic distinction more explicit, IL predicate omission and especially SL predicate omission should be
significantly lower in bilingual English than in monolingual English.
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Liceras et al.
Table 10. Data selection in Becker’s (2004, p. 159) study: English monolingual children
Child
Sessions
Age
Mean MLU
Nina
Peter
Naomi
Adam
7-13
6-11
35-68
10, 15, 18, 20, 25, 27, 28
2;00-2;02
2;00-2;03
2;00-2;07
2;07-3;04
2.98
2.84
3.09
3.38
Table 11. Data selection from the FerFuLice corpus: English–Spanish bilingual children
Child
Sessions
No. files
Age
Mean MLU
Simon
Leo
15-33
15-33
60
60
2;00-3;04
2;00-3;04
2.955
3.586
Data. The English data that we have analysed were produced by Simon and Leo (see
section ‘Null vs. overt subjects in the Spanish of English–Spanish bilinguals’ earlier for
details about the project and these two bilingual children). Table 10 shows the data selection in Becker’s (2004) study, and Table 11 displays our data selection.
The first thing that should be noticed is that the monolingual and the bilingual data are
perfectly comparable in terms of MLU. The second thing is that our data are much more
homogeneous than Becker’s data, since the two children were of the same age when the
data were elicited and we have covered the exact same period of time.
Table 12 depicts the total percentages of overt copula realization in the monolingual
data while Table 13 depicts the total percentages of overt copula realization in the bilingual data.
The comparison of the two tables clearly shows that only the monolingual children
produced significantly (p < .001) higher numbers of overt copula with IL predicates than
with SL predicates (Becker, 2004). In other words, as argued by Becker, the data from the
monolingual children reflect the syntactic–semantic difference between the two types of
predicates and may lend support to the proposal that, in children’s grammars, Guéron and
Hoekstra’s (1995) temporal anchoring requirement may be satisfied by the aspect phrase,
Table 12. Explicit be by predicate type: English monolingual childrena
Nominal predicates (IL)
Locative predicates (SL)
% overt total
(number of cases)
% overt total
(number of cases)
Nina
Peter
Naomi
Adam
% of explicit be
74.1%
86.4%
90.2%
52.0%
76.3%
(143)
(398)
(122)
(302)
13.0%
18.9%
33.3%
7.7%
18.8%
(115)
(90)
(30)
(26)
aAdapted
from Becker (2004, Table 1, p. 159).
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First Language 32(1-2)
Table 13. Explicit be by predicate type: English–Spanish bilingual children
Nominal predicates (IL)
Locative predicates (SL)
% overt total
(number of cases)
% overt total
(number of cases)
Leo
Simon
% of explicit be
90.5%
91.9%
91.2%
(115)
(125)
88%
89.2%
88.6%
(22)
(25)
as in (19a). The data from our bilingual children show that, even though the percentage of
overt copula in the case of IL predicates is slightly higher than in the case of SL predicates, it is not significantly higher (p = .65 for Leo; p = .67 for Simon), as was the case
with the monolingual data. Therefore, bilingual English seems to be closer to monolingual and bilingual Spanish than to monolingual English in terms of copula omission.
These data do not necessarily provide evidence against Becker’s proposal that child
grammar differs from adult grammar in that only in the former can the aspect phrase realize the temporal anchoring requirement (TOP binds Asp), because, if that overextension
happens in the case of estar (the one that carries aspectual value), it would demonstrate
that in the child grammar the aspectual phrase lexicalized as estar realizes the temporal
anchoring requirement.18 However, we would like to argue that these data provide evidence for the influencing role of Spanish in the English grammar of our bilingual children
or, to put it differently, for the acceleration of the process which leads children to incorporate the adult version of the temporal anchoring requirement (TOP binds Tense).
As for the overt vs. null realization of copula with adjectives, the results are shown in
Tables 14 and 15.
Table 14 shows that the difference between the total production of IL vs. SL adjectives
is not as clear-cut as it was in the case of the IL nominal vs. the SL locative predicates,
even though the data show a similar trend. However, the total difference is not significant
and for some children the direction is even reversed (Adam) or irrelevant (Peter). Becker
(2004) notes that only Naomi’s difference in the percentage of overt be with IL vs. SL
predicates was significant. It is interesting to note that while in the English monolingual
data adjectives offer a less transparent picture of the proposed grammar-based account,
Table 14. Explicit be by type of adjectival predicate: English monolingual childrena
IL adjectives
SL adjectives
% overt total
(number of cases)
% overt total
(number of cases)
Nina
Peter
Naomi
Adam
% of explicit be
62.5%
57.1%
93.5%
37.1%
62.6%
(24)
(28)
(29)
(35)
43.6%
51.2%
52.3%
41.0%
47.0%
(39)
(86)
(65)
(105)
aAdapted
from Becker (2004, Table 2, p. 161).
107
Liceras et al.
Table 15. Explicit be by type of adjectival predicate: English–Spanish bilingual children
IL adjectives
SL adjectives
% overt total
(number of cases)
% overt total
(number of cases)
Leo
Simon
% of explicit be
91.4%
95.8%
93.6%
(32)
(46)
86.6%
95.8%
91.2%
(26)
(23)
in the English bilingual data there are even fewer instances of omission than in the case
of nominal and locative predicates.
These two apparently contradictory results are not necessarily so, the reason being
that adjectives occur in contexts where it may be difficult for the child to determine their
aspectual vs. their non-aspectual value (he is hungry, he is a hungry man). As for
Spanish, while we have seen that children tend to overgeneralize estar with events, they
also produce non-adult instances of ser and estar with adjectives. In the case of Nico,
Silva-Corvalán and Montanari (2008) note that this only happens with adjectives that
can be used with both ser and estar (and that can have IL or SL interpretations) in the
adult language. Even though this comparison should again be subject to further investigation, it is obvious that the influence that Spanish may have in the twins’ English does
not promote omission but rather a higher rate of overt copula since, as Table 15 shows,
the total overt production of copula with adjectival predicates is extremely high in the
case of our bilingual children, even higher than with nominal and locative predicates
(Table 13). Therefore, these data further lend support to the hypothesis that Spanish may
influence the twins’ production of overt copula in English.
Thus, based on our comparison of the copula production/omission patterns in children’s English monolingual and English bilingual data, we can conclude that the English
bilingual data do not show the same pattern of omission as the English monolingual
data mainly because the total production of overt copula is very high for both nominal
and locative predicates and even higher for adjectival predicates. This implies that
Hypothesis 2 is confirmed in that there are more cases of explicit be with SL predicates
in the bilingual data, and also with IL predicates. Therefore, we would like to argue that
influence from Spanish may accelerate the process of establishment of adult-like temporal anchoring of sentences in the English grammar of the bilingual children. We
would also like to suggest that the phonetic transparency of Spanish estar and the availability of both ser and estar contribute to the earlier projection of the IP level with both
aspectual and non-aspectual predicates. Evidence that this is so is provided by the
Spanish and Catalan monolingual data (Bel, 2001; Sera, 1992) and the Spanish bilingual data (Gaulin, 2008; Silva-Corvalán & Montanari, 2008) and, as we have argued, it
is the availability of the Spanish grammar that has the same consequences for the
English grammar of the bilinguals.
Conclusions
We have argued that the differences between the copula omission patterns in monolingual
English vs. bilingual English provide evidence that interlinguistic influence from Spanish
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First Language 32(1-2)
plays a facilitating role in the implementation of the adult-like temporal anchoring
requirement and the projection of inflection with both IL predicates and SL predicates in
English. We have also argued that the reason why the directionality of interference –
which happens to have a facilitating effect – goes from Spanish into English lies in the
fact that the difference between IL and SL predicates is lexically realized in Spanish. This
differentiation, which determines the low rates of copula omission in monolingual and
bilingual Spanish (and also in Catalan, a language whose copula system is the same as the
Spanish one), is transferred to bilingual English. The directionality of interlinguistic
influence would not go from English into Spanish in the case of copula omission, because
English does not differentiate the two types of copula lexically.
With respect to the number of overt Spanish subjects produced by the bilingual twins,
we have shown that it is not higher than the number of subjects produced by monolingual
Spanish children, which evidences that the directionality of interlinguistic influence
from English, where subjects are syntactically obligatory rather than being pragmatically
distributed, does not occur. We have argued that this is so because, in spite of the fact that
the use of overt subjects in Spanish is located at the pragmatic interface, the core syntactic nature of obligatory subjects in English is not transferred into Spanish. In other words,
core syntactic operations in one language are not candidates for causing interlinguistic
influence on the other language of bilingual children. However, since it happens to be the
case that our bilingual twins had a balanced command of both English and Spanish, we
do not know whether a situation of clear language dominance from English might
provide different results.
Furthermore and also with respect to the directionality of interlinguistic influence in
the production and omission of subjects, our proposal concerning the lack of interlinguistic influence in the case of core syntax (the fact that the core operation that makes overt
subjects obligatory in English is not transferred) would also imply that Spanish null
subjects would not lead to an overproduction of null subjects in the English of the bilinguals. This would be so because the licensing of null subjects in Spanish is an operation
of core syntax and, therefore, would not trigger interlinguistic influence from Spanish
into English. In this case we would not expect a different pattern of subject omission in
the English of bilinguals with respect to the English of monolinguals, because the operation that makes null subjects possible in Spanish is also a core grammar operation and
core grammar operations do not cause interlinguistic influence.
We have proposed that Spanish influences English in terms of a lower rate of copula
omission because of what we have called lexical transparency, i.e. the different lexical
realization (ser and estar) of the two types of predicates. If our proposal is on the right
track, the generalization would be that, in a bilingual situation, lexical transparency in
one of the languages of the bilinguals will facilitate the acquisition of the other language, specifically if compared to the monolinguals. This is the case of copula omission
in the English of English–Spanish bilinguals where Spanish is the lexical transparent
language (ser/estar). An anonymous reviewer wonders whether we could extend the
concept of transparency to the issue of subjects: Spanish would be the more transparent
language because Spanish has ‘two different forms, null and overt pronouns, for different semantic/pragmatic meanings’. In this respect, Spanish has two different sets of
subjects: pronouns (pragmatic value) and pronominal agreement markers (syntactic
value), and this could be interpreted as another instance of transparency where Spanish
Liceras et al.
109
would also facilitate the implementation of obligatory subjects in English (lexical
transparency linked to a semantic dimension). This implies that the null subject period
would be shorter in bilingual English than in monolingual English, if the other language
of the bilingual is Spanish-like. In other words, from the point of view of vulnerability,
English bilinguals will not produce more null subjects than English monolinguals
because null subjects in Spanish are regulated at the pragmatic interface; alternatively,
from the point of view of transparency as a facilitator, they would have fewer null subjects since, in one of the two languages (Spanish), the subject is realized by two different sets of lexical items: a set of lexical items to lexicalize syntactic subjecthood
(agreement markers); and another set of lexical items (subject pronouns) with a pragmatic function. In English both functions are realized by the same set of lexical items
(overt subject pronouns). However, there is not a total parallelism with the copula
because the copula has no emphatic value, while the pragmatic realization of subject
pronouns in English resorts to emphasis.
Our discussion raises an issue that is not related to the directionality of interlinguistic
influence or to language dominance but to whether there is a copula omission (CO) stage
in child language development, parallel to the existence of an RI stage. In fact, this is
what Becker’s (2000, 2004) proposal implies because, for children to overcome the RI
stage, the IP has to cease to be optionally projected (Hoekstra & Hyams, 1995; Hyams,
1996; Rizzi, 1994; Wexler, 1994), as is the case with the CO stage.
There is another way in which the RI and the CO stage would coincide and it is the
fact that the presence of RIs has been accounted for as a developmental stage in which
child sentence structure is truncated at the aspectual phrase level (Bel, 2001; Hyams,
2007; Liceras, Bel, & Perales, 2006), and it is precisely the AspP that serves as the locus
for satisfying the temporal anchoring constraint in child language. Therefore, if there is
a correlation between the two phenomena, CO optionality could be accounted for along
similar lines as RI optionality. However, we would like to suggest that talking about
an optional CO or RI stage, in other words, providing a grammatical account of these
phenomena, does not exclude the need to address omission in terms of performance
limitations by using adequate experimental data. We would also like to suggest that
further research should look at whether interlinguistic influence occurs in other pairs of
languages where only one realizes both ser/estar or where one of the languages has
copula estar but not copula ser (the case of Nahuatl).
Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions as well as the editors of
this special issue.
Funding
This research was funded by by the Research Services and the Faculty of Arts of the University
of Ottawa, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC #410-20042034), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, Dirección General de Investigación
Científica, and FEDER (DGICYT #BFF2002-00442; and HUM2007-62213), and also by the
Castile and León Regional Government in Spain, Consejería de Educación (VA046A06).
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First Language 32(1-2)
Notes
1. An anonymous reviewer suggests that since it is a well-known fact that monolingual child
English shows null subjects at the first stages of development, it would be interesting to
investigate whether bilingual English contains more null subjects and for a longer period
than monolingual English. We agree that it is an interesting question and our prediction is
that this will not be the case. However, we will not be pursuing this issue in this article.
2. FerFuLice corpus: English–Spanish bilingual twins. CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000), from
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/
3. The issue of the identification of null subjects is less clear-cut in that one possible interpretation of Rizzi’s (1986) proposal is that identification, as licensing, is an abstract property of
the grammar which is based on the existence of rich inflection or topic-chains (Huang, 1984).
However, identification can also be construed as being semantic or pragmatic, since inflection may be ambiguous and semantic features, discourse properties or processing preferences
(Bel, Salas, & Perera, 2008; Carminati, 2002; Montrul, 2004; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006) may
determine how null subjects are identified.
4. The parentheses indicate that the copula was not pronounced.
5. The twins’ data are from the FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES. Manuela’s data are from the
Deuchar and Quay (2000) corpus and are available in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). The
monolingual data from María, Emilio and Juan are from López-Ornat’s, Vila’s and Linaza’s
corpora respectively, also available in CHILDES.
6. See Liceras, Spradlin, and Fernández Fuertes (2005) and Liceras, Fernández Fuertes, and
Pérez Tattam (2008) for more information about these data.
7. The averages for English were 1.23 (stage 1), 3.28 (stage 2) and 4.32 (stage 3). The averages for Spanish were 1.45 (stage 1), 3.56 (stage 2) and 4.08 (stage 3) (Liceras et al., 2008,
Tables 5.2 and 5.3, pp. 121–122).
8. Cuban Spanish, and Caribbean Spanish in general, is nonetheless considered a null subject
language (Toribio, 1994). However, some scholars argue that the Dominican variety of
Spanish should be considered a partial null subject language (Martínez, forthcoming).
9. An anonymous reviewer wonders whether this would indicate that the bilingual twins have
not acquired the pragmatic knowledge yet. There is no evidence that the contexts in which
null subjects are used by these children would require an overt subject. However, we think
that we cannot provide an answer on the basis of these data although we have not come across
any instances of so-called ‘illicit’ null subjects (Montrul, 2004).
10. Paradis and Navarro (2003) mention that the bilingual Catalan–English child studied in JuanGarau and Pérez-Vidal (2000) had a slightly higher rate of subject production in Catalan than
these monolinguals (thus, closer to Manuela’s).
11. Paradis and Navarro (2003, p. 385) used Mann–Whitney U tests to carry out the comparisons.
12. Nathual and some Amerindian languages have no copula though in these languages adjectives
and nouns can be inflected. In Chinese, both states and qualities are generally expressed with
stative verbs without an overt copula (in the case of adjectival predicates) or with an overt
copula (in the case of nominal predicates). In languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian
and Russian, the copula is not pronounced in the present tense, a phenomenon that is usually
referred to as ‘zero copula’ (for details about the copula in the various languages see Everaert,
van Riemsdijk, Goedemans, & Hollebrandse, 2006).
13. Even though the clear-cut link of stage-level predicates to aspect is undeniable, the distribution of copula ser and estar in Spanish is rather complex, as many syntactic and semantic
analyses have shown (Lema, 1995; Luján, 1981; Schmitt, 1992). Recently, Maienborn (2005)
has provided a discourse-based account of Spanish ser/estar; Schmitt, Holtheuer, and Miller
Liceras et al.
111
(2004) have investigated whether Spanish children have problems when interpreting the
distinctions between ser and estar when both options are grammatical, and Schmitt and
Miller (2007) have investigated children’s ability to distinguish between the Spanish copulas
ser and estar when copula choice depends on contextual properties.
14. For other accounts of the differences between IL and SL predicates see Chierchia (1995).
15. According to Becker (2000), this account is based on Stowell’s (1978) account of
there-insertion.
16. In Liceras et al. (2006) it is argued that the length of the RI stage is determined by the phonetic
realization of two different features in the target grammar: [P], which determines how person
is marked, and [R], which refers to how distinctly non-finite (infinitival) forms are realized in
any given language.
17. The children, data corpora and language development periods are depicted in Table 7. We
should like to thank Aurora Bel, from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, for making these additional data on the production and omission of copula ser and estar available to us.
18. This implies that, if there is overextension, estar would be overextended to ser uses but not
the other way around. Sera (1992, 2008) mentions some cases of what seems to be overextension of estar but further investigation is necessary. While due to time and space limitations we
cannot address this issue in this article, it is an item on our immediate research agenda. An
anonymous reviewer indicates that a potential overextension of estar would go against the
proposal that lexical transparency helps children build different structures for different meanings. We do not agree with this statement because only children can select the aspectual
phrase to build temporal anchoring and this is precisely what they would be doing if they
overextended estar. While lexical transparency helps, implementing the ser/estar distinction
cannot be an all-or-nothing affair, that is, it does not imply that there will be no cases of nonadult retrieval.
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