Eventive and stative passives: the role of transfer in the acquisition of ser and estar by German L1 speakers
Joyce Bruhn de Garavito and Elena Valenzuela
The University of Western Ontario
joycebg@uwo.ca, evalenzu@uwo.ca
Although the acquisition of verbal and adjectival passives has been the subject of a great deal of research in first language acquisition it has not received much attention in second language research. In Spanish, the two types of passive relate directly to one of the most difficult areas of acquisition: the differences between the copular verbs ser and estar. As the examples in (1) show, ser is used with a participle to express an eventive passive, while estar with a participle expresses a state. The passive with ser allows the presence of an agent (Luján 1981), while estar does not. Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela ( 2005; 2006) showed that even when learners performed at ceiling with adjectives, they exhibited a great deal of difficulty distinguishing the use of the two copulas with participles. This in spite of the fact that the two types of passive exist in English, the L1 of the learners, although the difference is not overtly marked in this language.
(1) a. La comida fue servida por un mesero muy simpático.
The dinner was served by a very nice waiter.
b. La comida está servida (*por un mesero muy simpático).
The dinner is served (*by a very nice waiter).
In this paper we will examine the acquisition of the two passives by learners whose L1 encodes the difference in a way very similar to Spanish. As seen below, German expresses an eventive passive with the verb werden, while an adjectival passive takes the verb sein (Kratzer, 2000; Examples from Abbot-Smith and Behrens, 2006).
(2) a. Der Reis war gekocht.
The rice was cooked (in a state of being cooked)
b. Der Reis wurde gekocht.
The rice was (went through a process) of being cooked.
The inclusion of learners whose L1 is similar to the L2 will allow us to tease apart the cause of the difficulty encountered by the English L1 speakers. Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela argued that it was caused by differences between English and Spanish participles, and not because of the copulas. However, there is now widespread agreement that the difference between the copulas is aspectual, both in German (see Abbot-Smith and Behrens 2006) and in Spanish (Luján 1981; Lema 1992; Schmitt 1992). Aspect has been found to be problematic for English L2 learners (Montrul and Slabakova 2003). Transfer from the L1 would predict that the German learners would have no problems with the Spanish.
The experiment included two groups of speakers, a group of L2 German learners of Spanish (n=15) and a control group (n=10). The learners completed three tasks: a grammaticality judgment task, a truth value judgment task, and a translation task, besides a placement test and a language profile. We predict that transfer cannot explain the results. Rather, it is possible that aspectual distinctions, which lie at the syntax/semantics interface, may not be easily accessed either from the input or from the L1.
Joyce Bruhn de Garavito and Elena Valenzuela
The University of Western Ontario
joycebg@uwo.ca, evalenzu@uwo.ca
Although the acquisition of verbal and adjectival passives has been the subject of a great deal of research in first language acquisition it has not received much attention in second language research. In Spanish, the two types of passive relate directly to one of the most difficult areas of acquisition: the differences between the copular verbs ser and estar. As the examples in (1) show, ser is used with a participle to express an eventive passive, while estar with a participle expresses a state. The passive with ser allows the presence of an agent (Luján 1981), while estar does not. Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela ( 2005; 2006) showed that even when learners performed at ceiling with adjectives, they exhibited a great deal of difficulty distinguishing the use of the two copulas with participles. This in spite of the fact that the two types of passive exist in English, the L1 of the learners, although the difference is not overtly marked in this language.
(1) a. La comida fue servida por un mesero muy simpático.
The dinner was served by a very nice waiter.
b. La comida está servida (*por un mesero muy simpático).
The dinner is served (*by a very nice waiter).
In this paper we will examine the acquisition of the two passives by learners whose L1 encodes the difference in a way very similar to Spanish. As seen below, German expresses an eventive passive with the verb werden, while an adjectival passive takes the verb sein (Kratzer, 2000; Examples from Abbot-Smith and Behrens, 2006).
(2) a. Der Reis war gekocht.
The rice was cooked (in a state of being cooked)
b. Der Reis wurde gekocht.
The rice was (went through a process) of being cooked.
The inclusion of learners whose L1 is similar to the L2 will allow us to tease apart the cause of the difficulty encountered by the English L1 speakers. Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela argued that it was caused by differences between English and Spanish participles, and not because of the copulas. However, there is now widespread agreement that the difference between the copulas is aspectual, both in German (see Abbot-Smith and Behrens 2006) and in Spanish (Luján 1981; Lema 1992; Schmitt 1992). Aspect has been found to be problematic for English L2 learners (Montrul and Slabakova 2003). Transfer from the L1 would predict that the German learners would have no problems with the Spanish.
The experiment included two groups of speakers, a group of L2 German learners of Spanish (n=15) and a control group (n=10). The learners completed three tasks: a grammaticality judgment task, a truth value judgment task, and a translation task, besides a placement test and a language profile. We predict that transfer cannot explain the results. Rather, it is possible that aspectual distinctions, which lie at the syntax/semantics interface, may not be easily accessed either from the input or from the L1.
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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.