Copula Omission Is a Grammatical Reflex

Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English–Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence

“…Thus, (7) would contain a nominal/individual-level predicate while (8) would contain a locative/stage-level predicate: 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.…”

“…The debate on whether the omission of subjects in monolingual child language acquisition is to be accounted for syntactically (Bel, 2001;Hyams, 1986Hyams, , 1996Hyams & Wexler, 1993;Rizzi, 1993Rizzi, /4, 1994Wang, 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 (2000Becker ( , 2004. However, in the case of child bilingual acquisition, the competence/processing debate has been overshadowed by the issue of interlinguistic influence.…”

“…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 (2000Becker ( , 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) Mamá ES una chica 'Mommy is a girl' (4) Mi lápiz ESTÁ ahí debajo 'My pen is down there' Becker (2000Becker ( , 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) 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 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.…”

“…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.…”

Linguistic interfaces and language acquisition in childhood: Introduction to the special issue

“…Putting it differently, they claim that core syntactic phenomena do not 'transfer.' Second, they compare the patterns of omission/production of copula by Simon and Leo to those of Becker's (2000Becker's ( , 2004 monolingual children (both monolingual and bilingual have the same MLUs). Even though there were some similarities in the overall omission patterns with respect to the locative/nominal predicate dichotomy, the results were never significant.…”