Copula omission in the English developing grammar of English/Spanish bilingual children

Abstract

The present study takes as a point of departure Becker's analysis of the copula be in English monolingual data and focuses on the distribution of copula be in the data from two English/Spanish bilingual children. Our data analysis shows that, as in Becker's study, the distribution of copula omission in the bilingual data is determined by the nature of the predicate. However, the omission patterns in our English bilingual data do not coincide with those described by Becker for the English monolingual data, since total omission is very low in our data and there are no significant differences between the stage-level (SL) and the individual-level (IL) predicates. We attribute this to crosslinguistic influence from Spanish, specifically, to the existence of two distinct copulas in Spanish, ser and estar; in particular, we propose that the lexical distinction between these two predicates may trigger the earlier projection of inflection and with it the use of an overt copula in both languages, but specifically in English, and for both SL and IL predicates.