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

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.

Focus in Dutch reading: an eye-tracking experiment with heritage speakers of Turkish

“…Other studies on the use of pronouns by EnglishItalian bilinguals, such as Serratrice, Sorace, and Paoli (2004) and Sorace, Serratrice, Filiaci, and Baldo (2009), concern children. These studies demonstrated two important points.…”

Different sources of delay and acceleration in early child bilingualism

“…The coordination of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge is a demanding task for young children in general (Avrutin 1999), and even more so in the case of bilingual children since they have to evaluate competing solutions to the syntax-pragmatics problem from two different languages. For the null-subject property, Serratrice et al (2004) predict that cross-linguistic influence will affect Italian, the more complex language. Cross-linguistic influence caused by processing limitations will lead to delay in the language whose processing is more complex.…”

“…That the delay effects are caused by processing complexity and not by linguistic complexity can be tested, since both views make different predictions for the acquisition process. According to Serratrice et al (2004), the presence and direction of the influence is a question of more-or-less constrained. In the case of null-subjects, the combination French-Italian should be as problematic as the combination GermanItalian or English-Italian.…”

Between syntax and discourse

“…In particular, early and late bilinguals (heritage speakers and L2 learners alike) have been reported to display deficits in the domain of inflectional morphology and narrow syntax, and both groups also seem to have difficulties with discourse-level phenomena. The former problem is manifested in errors or non-target-like performance with case, gender, agreement, verbal aspect, and long-distance dependencies (Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky, 2010;Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky, 2013a, b;Hawkins & Hattori, 2006;Montrul, 2002Montrul, , 2005Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñán, 2008;Polinsky, 1997Polinsky, , 2006Polinsky, , 2008aPolinsky, , b, 2011White, 2003), and the latter problem involves infelicitous linguistic choices in contexts that require discourse tracking or external pragmatic knowledge to resolve apparent contextual optionality (Laleko, 2010;Laleko & Polinsky, 2013;Montrul, 2004;Serratrice, Sorace, & Paoli, 2004;Sorace, 2011;Sorace, Serratrice, Filiaci, & Baldo, 2009). marking, and phenomena governed by external pragmatic conditions, e.g., topicalization and pronominal anaphora (Sorace, 2011 and references therein).…”