Natalia Mazzaro - University of Toronto
Double negatives: morphology in contact.

Anahí Alba de la Fuente - University of Ottawa
Copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: a “transfer” account.

Lia Walsh - Patricia López Morelos - University of Ottawa
Medial WH-Questions in Native and Non-Native Spanish: Learnability and Methodological Issues.

Ewelina Barski - UWO
The acquisition of gender in the L2 Spanish of L1 Polish speakers.

Ana García - UWO
La presencia Docente en Contextos Online Asincrónicos en el aprendizaje del español como L2.

Yolanda Pangtay - UWO
Instant Messenger Conversations in Spanish: Written or Oral Discourse?

Sonia Maria Nunes Reis - UWO
European Portuguese (EP) versus Brazilian Portuguese (BP): its challenges in L2 Portuguese undergraduate courses

Patricia Bayona - UWO
Crosslinguistic Influences in the Acquisition of Spanish L3.

Maria Eugenia de Luna Villalón - UWO
Migración temporal: un factor importante para repensar las lenguas en contacto.

Alma P. Ramírez-Trujillo. -UWO
Adult Acquisition of Infinitives in Spanish by Nahuatl speakers.

Joyce Bruhn de Garavito and Elena Valenzuela. - UWO
Eventive and stative passives: the role of transfer in the acquisition of ser and estar by German L1 speakers.






Saturday, February 7, 2009

European Portuguese (EP) versus Brazilian Portuguese (BP): its challenges in L2 Portuguese undergraduate courses

European Portuguese (EP) versus Brazilian Portuguese (BP): its challenges in L2 Portuguese undergraduate courses

Sonia Maria Nunes Reis, The University of Western Ontario

Issues such as the teaching of clitic placement in Portuguese and the challenges associated with dialect variations leaves room for much discussion in curriculum design and curriculum delivery in post-secondary institutions. Portuguese has the status of being an official language in various countries, but European and Brazilian Portuguese stand as the two varieties most often discussed in experimental literature. Despite the similarities between EP and BP, their syntactic and phonological differences are more extreme than in some other cases of variation, such as the variation found in Spanish, an issue that gives rise to the present study. We are particularly interested in clitic placement from an L2 Acquisition standpoint, and more specifically in the challenges faced in L2 Portuguese courses at the university level. That is, issues pertaining but not limited to:

What attitudes are found amongst L2 Portuguese instructors and L2 Portuguese learners with respect to the two variables of the Portuguese language and the existence of two Portuguese dialects?

Is there a connection between these attitudes of the instructors versus the attitudes of the students in question?

Are the students confused with respect to pronouns in Portuguese?

According to Kato and Raposo (1994), the distinction between EP and BP is dialectal: “European and Brazilian Portuguese have long been considered as two dialects of the same language, with variable aspects in their lexicon, phonology, and grammar.” Along these lines, we are herein interested in studying the phenomenon of dialectal applications of clitic placement in the both variants of the Portuguese language. Examples of dialectal variations between EP and BP are as follow (1) (2):

(1)
a. Chamo-me Sónia. (EP)
b. Me chamo Sônia. (BP)

(2)
a. Eu vi-o no ano passado. (EP- written and spoken)
b. Eu vi ele no ano passado. (BP- spoken)
c. Eu o vi no ano passado. (BP- written)

A questionnaire was given to instructors and students of L2 Portuguese at a Canadian university in order to find out how problematic this issue was and how it was generally approached in different institutions. A grammaticality judgment task was also administered to both groups to see which dialect of the Portuguese language (EP or BP) would be preferred in regards to clitic placement. This grammaticality judgment task differed in that its objective was to ascertain which of the two dialects had been internalized by the learners, or if in fact learners accepted both. In the case of the instructors, the grammaticality judgment task also asked, in those forms that were rejected, why they were rejected, whether it was because it simply did not sound grammatical, or whether it was because the rejected form was seen as substandard or uneducated. The results will be discussed.
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Copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: a “transfer” account

A. Alba de la Fuente, University of Ottawa
R. Fernández Fuertes, Universidad de Valladolid
J. M. Liceras, Universidad de Ottawa

The debate on whether the omission of subjects in child language is to be accounted for syntactically (Hyams and Wexler 1993) or is the result of a processing deficit (Valian 1991, Valian and Eisenberg 1996) has been extrapolated to copula omission by Becker (2002, 2004). This author argues that the differences in the use of overt copula be versus null copula be in child English rather than being a product of sentence length are determined by the semantic nature of the predicate as in (1) versus (2).
(1) lady __ on that (Nina, 2;02) (2) this is lady (Naomi, 2;02)
Locative predicates, as the Prepositional Phrase in (1), are aspectual and it is their Aspectual Phrase that provides temporal anchoring to the sentence (Guéron and Hoekstra 1995). This results in the possibility of using null be with these types of predicates. However, Nominal predicates, like the Noun Phrase in (2), are not aspectual and, therefore, copula be must be explicit to ensure temporal anchoring.
As for copula be with adjective predicates as in (3) and (4), these predicates could be considered Locative or Nominal (Stage-Level or Individual-Level, following Carlson 1977 and Schmitt and Miller’s 2007 terminology) depending on the type of adjective and on the context, so that (3) would contain a Locative/Stage-Level predicate, while (4) a Nominal/Individual-Level one. In this case, even though the results were less clear-cut and individual differences occurred both quantitatively and qualitatively, the stage-level predicate (3) versus the individual-level predicate (4) dichotomy parallels the Locative/Nominal one.
(3) I __ hungry (Leo, 2;11) (4) Elmo is blue (Simon, 2;05)
In this paper, we provide an analysis of the copula in the developing English grammar of two English/Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the following issues: 1) whether a grammar-based or a processing-based approach best accounts for child omissions; 2) whether our data mirror the ones discussed by Becker with respect to the differences between Locative and Stage-level predicates versus Nominal and Individual level predicates; 3) whether the differences and similarities are shaped by the fact that Spanish copula is realized by two lexical items: estar (for cases like those in (1) and (3) above) and ser (for cases like those in (2) and (4) above); in other words, whether interlinguistic influence (Hulk and Müller 2000; Paradis and Navarro 2003) can be found in this specific area of grammar.
We have analyzed longitudinal data from the two bilingual children which cover the same age and MLU counts as in the four children in Becker’s (2004) study. An analysis of our data shows that: (i) a grammatical account is favoured over a processing one when the length of the utterances is measured as a word count; (ii) even though there are some similarities in the overall omission patterns with respect to the Locative/Nominal predicate dichotomy, the results are never significant. In the case of the Stage/Individual-level predicates, our data are even less transparent than the monolingual data: in fact our two children display opposite patterns of omission; and (iii) the lexical transparency of Spanish copula estar seems to play a role in the need to incorporate the inflectional level and, therefore, in the copula omission pattern, since our children’s rate of omission is significantly lower than the rate of omission displayed by Becker’s monolingual children.

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