What does the acquisition of the determiner phrase features reveal about bilingualism and L2 acquisition? Some introductory remarks

Abstract

From a formal linguistic perspective, our understanding of how child and adult bilinguals acquire grammar has to date been mainly based on investigations of clause structure and the morphosyntax within the verbal domain. The development of nominals, however, has so far not been investigated at the same level and degree of detail. In particular, comparatively little attention has been placed on the study of the acquisition of nominal structure and of the morphosyntax of nouns, modifying adjectives and their determiners. As a result, no consensus exists concerning the nature of the dif- ficulty in acquiring some or all determiner phrase (DP) features specifically (e.g. the role of L1 features for additive bilingualism or the degree of cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous bilin- gualism and more). One aim of this Special Issue is to begin to fill this research gap by presenting research on closely related aspects of the structure and morphosyntax of DPs.Adhering to the generative grammar perspective (Chomsky, 1995) of language acquisition, the articles in this special issue discuss the acquisition and processing of various DP properties in sev- eral languages (e.g. in three Romance languages (i.e. French, Italian and Spanish), German and Basque) in different adult and child bilingual contexts. The focus of this Special Issue is on three closely related aspects of the structure and morphosyntax of nominal DPs, namely, gender features agreement, specificity and genericity constraints for interpretation of full and bare nominal clauses following proposals on the topic (Chierchia, 1998; Dayal, 2004; Longobardi, 2001; Schmitt & Munn, 2002) where the D element seems to be responsible for the different possibilities in seman- tic interpretation.This Special Issue consists of four state-of-the-art research articles followed by a concise dis- cussant piece for each by a well-known researcher in the field. In addition, one concise concluding remark article has been written by a renowned scholar in the field, addressing all or part of the issues raised by the individual contributors in the volume and, more importantly, highlighting how the issue as a whole adds to formal acquisition theory in second-language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism. The present volume is a product of a colloquium on the adult and bilingual acquisi- tion as part of the International Symposium on Bilingualism 7 (ISB7) edition held in Utrecht (The Netherlands) in 2009.Overview of the contributions to this volumeThe first two articles deal with child bilingualism. In particular, the study by Eichler, Jansen and Muller evaluates gender acquisition within DPs adopting Abney's (1987) analysis comparing 2 monolingual German children and 17 bilingual children acquiring either a Romance language (i.e. French, Spanish, Italian) and German or two Romance languages simultaneously at different ages. The authors further compared the two languages within the bilingual children to one another with respect to the acquisition of gender. The influence of different variables on gender acquisition is also under scrutiny: namely, language dominance, transparency of gender marking and/or reliabil- ity of gender cues in the respective languages are hypothesized to influence the speed or delay of its acquisition. According to their main findings, bilingual children can gain the gender systems in both languages just as monolinguals do and bilingualism per se does not have a delaying effect contrary to what previous studies have claimed. In the case of the bilingual as well as in monolin- gual children, the acquisition of gender in German seems to be most problematic. French, on the other hand, embodies only slightly more problems than the other two Romance languages (i.e. Spanish and Italian), with the two-gender systems in both Spanish and Italian being acquired with ease. Eichler, Jansen and Muller came to the conclusions that, in both German and French, adult phonological gender rules are typified by their rather low validity. …