Complejidad lingüística y adquisición bilingüe español-inglés

En este trabajo examino los factores discursivo-pragmáticos que condicionan la expresión del pronombre sujeto y la posición del sujeto en la oración para indagar si se pueden establecer diferentes grados de complejidad de estos factores. Examino luego el efecto que la posible complejidad relativa de estos aspectos de la gramática del español parece tener en el proceso de adquisición de esta lengua por bilingües simultáneos español-inglés

Conditional for Subjunctive in Old Castile

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1982

Does language loss follow a principled structural path? Evidence from Jersey Norman French

ABSTRACTThis study examines contact-induced change in Jèrriais, the severely endangered Norman variety currently spoken by some 1% of the population of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands. Today, English dominates all linguistic domains of island life, and all speakers of Jèrriais are bilingual. The analysis uses original data to test empirically whether Myers-Scotton's (2002) five theoretical assumptions about the structural path of language attrition (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the individual) also have relevance for the process of language obsolescence (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the community). It explores i) whether Jèrriais is undergoing contact influenced language change owing to its abstract grammatical structure being split and recombined with English, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's Abstract Level model; and ii) whether different morpheme types of Jèrriais are related to the production process in different ways and are, accordingly, more or less susceptible to change during the process of language obsolescence, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's 4-M model. In addition to its contribution to linguistic theory, this study increases existing knowledge about Jèrriais and makes data from this language available for systematic comparison with other languages.</jats:p

The variable expression of future tense in Peninsular Spanish: The present (and future) of inflectional forms in the Spanish spoken in a bilingual region

In line with trends observed in other Spanish and Romance-speaking regions, the morphological future tense MF (cantaré) is declining in the Castellón speech community (Spain) in favor of the periphrastic variant PF (voy a cantar) for the expression of future events. The multivariate analysis shows the relevance of some linguistic factors in this process, mainly the degree of proximity of the act of speech, the sentence and epistemic modality, the degree of adverbial specification, the class of verbs and, to a lesser extent, the semantic category of the subject (agency), and the types of clause and text. All in all, MF still enjoys a substantial vitality in this Spanish region unknown in other Hispanic areas and that can be related to a convergence process with Catalan, the other language of the region which shares a single variant for expressing the future, namely, the morphological form. Some additional data obtained from 191 interviews of the Sociolinguistic Corpus of Castellón (CSCS) point out the relevance of social factors related with the density of the bilingual population in the speech community, both at the collective and individual levels. The vernacular profile of this MF, favored and retained for the most autochthones elements of society, also clashes with the sociolinguistic profile of this variant in other Spanish-speaking areas where the process of substitution has been described in many cases as a change for below. In sum, language contact can slow down and alter some linguistic change much more advanced in monolingual communities

When reduced input leads to delayed acquisition: a study on the acquisition of clitic placement by Portuguese heritage speakers

This article examines the competence of heritage speakers of Portuguese living in Germany with respect to clitic placement in Portuguese by comparing their performance with that of monolingual speakers of the same age (7–15 years of age) in a test designed to elicit oral production data. The results of the study indicate that the heritage speakers go through stages in the acquisition of clitic placement that are similar to those of monolingual acquirers even though they take longer to attain the target grammar

Heritage language anxiety and majority language anxiety among Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands

Aims and objectives: This study examines the language anxiety that occurs in immigrants’ daily lives when speaking the heritage language and the majority language, both in their host country and during visits to their home country. It compares the levels of heritage language anxiety and majority language anxiety across three generations of the Turkish immigrant community in the Netherlands and explores the link between immigrants’ language anxiety, and sociobiographical (i.e. generation, gender, education) and language background variables (i.e. age of acquisition, self-perceived proficiency, frequency of language use). Design: A Likert scale-based questionnaire was administered to 116 participants across three generations who reported their language anxiety levels when speaking the heritage language and the majority language in three social contexts (i.e. family, friendship and speaking with native speakers). Findings: Statistical analyses revealed that heritage language anxiety and majority language anxiety were prevalent in immigrants’ daily life, and that levels of both forms of anxiety differed across generations, and in different daily life situations. First- and second-generation immigrants typically experienced majority language anxiety, while second- and predominantly third-generation immigrants suffered from heritage language anxiety. Relationships emerged between language background variables and both forms of anxiety, but only in certain situations. These findings suggest that language background variables on their own may be insufficient to explain immigrant language anxiety in certain social contexts (i.e. within family). Rather than merely language background factors, a variety of other issues within social, cultural and national currents must be considered when examining language anxiety in the immigrant context. Implications: Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines language contact and foreign language anxiety/second language anxiety research, this study suggests that the concept of foreign language anxiety/second language anxiety should be expanded beyond the confines of the classroom in order to include daily interactions immigrant or minority communities. Originality: This study contributes to the limited body of evidence on the topic of language anxiety in immigrant contexts and presents a new construct ‘majority language anxiety’