•  
  •  
 

Abstract

This paper describes the development of temporal expressions in a bilingual child acquiring two typologically distinct languages: Italian and Indonesian. These languages differ from one another in the way tense and aspect are encoded and it is interesting to observe what kind of cross-linguistic influence one language system has on the other. Italian verbs are heavily inflected for person, number as well as for tense, aspect and mood, whereas, in Indonesian, the encoding of tense and aspect is lexical rather than morphological; moreover encoding is optional when the context is sufficiently clear. This means that tense and aspect in Indonesian is often marked pragmatically rather than grammatically. This paper considers the interference effects that result from simultaneously acquiring these two typologically distinct systems.

References

Antelmi, Donatella. 1997. La prima grammatica dell’italiano. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Antinucci, Francesco and Ruth Miller. 1976. “How children talk about what happened”, Journal of Child Language 3: 167-189.

Bernini, Giuliano. 2004. “La seconda volta; La (ri)costituzione di categorie linguistiche nell’acquisizione di L2”, in: Lidia Costamagna and Stefania Giannini (eds), Acquisizione e mutamento di categorie linguistiche; Atti del XXVIII Convegno della Società Italiana di Glottologia, Perugia, 23-25 October 2003, pp. 121-150. Roma: Il Calamo.

Bernini, Giuliano and Anna Giacalone Ramat (eds). 1990. La temporalità nell’acquisizione di lingue seconde. Milano: Franco Angeli. [Materiali linguistici 2.]

Bhatia, Tej K. and William C. Ritchie. 2004. The handbook of bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Bialystok, Ellen. 2001. Bilingualism in development; Language, literacy, and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bronckart Jean P. and Hermine Sinclair. 1973. “Time, tense and aspect”, Cognition, 2(1): 107-130.

Crystal, D. 1997. English as a global language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

De Houwer, Annick. 1995. “Bilingual language acquisition”, in: Fletcher, Paul and Brian Mac Whinney (eds), The handbook of child language, pp. 219-250. Oxford: Blackwell.

Döpke, Susanne. 1998. “Competing language structures; The acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German-English children”, Journal of Child Language 25: 555-584.

Döpke, Susanne. 2001a. “Introduction; On the status of cross-linguistic structures in research on young children growing up with two languages simultaneously”, in: Susanne Döpke (ed.), Cross-linguistic structures in simultaneous bilingualism, pp. 1-10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Döpke, Susanne. 2001b. “The interplay between language-specific development and cross-linguistic influence”, in: Susanne Döpke (ed.), Cross-linguistic structures in simultaneous bilingualism, pp. 79-103. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ewing, Michael. 2005. “Colloquial Indonesian”, in: Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus Himmelmann (eds), The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar, pp. 227-258. London: Routledge.

Gawlitzek-Maiwald, Ira and Rosemarie Tracy. 1996. “Bilingual bootstrapping”, Linguistics 34: 901-926.

Grosjean, François. 1982. Life with two languages. Cambridge, Mass./Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.

Grosjean, François. 1998. “Studying bilinguals; Methodological and conceptual issues”, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1(2): 131-149.

Guasti, Maria Teresa. 1993. “Verb syntax in Italian child grammar; Finite and nonfinite verbs”, Language Acquisition 3: 1-40.

Hulk, Afke and Natasha Müller. 2000. “Cross-linguistic influence at the interface between syntax and pragmatics”, Bilingualism; Language and Cognition 3(3): 227-244.

Hyams, Nina. 1986. Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.

Kupisch, Tania. 2007. “Determiners in bilingual German-Italian children; What they tell us about the relation between language influence and language dominance”, Bilingualism; Language and Cognition, 10(1): 57-78.

Lanza, Elizabeth. 1992 . “Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch?”, Journal of Child Language, 19, 3: 633 - 658.

Lanza, Elizabeth. 2001. “Concluding remarks; Language contact – A dilemma for the bilingual child or for the linguist?”, in: Susanne Döpke (ed.), Crosslinguistic structures in simultaneous bilingualism, pp. 227-245. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project; Tools for analyzing talk. Third edition. Vol. I and II. New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum.

MacWhinney, Brian and Catherine Snow. 1985. “The child language data exchange system”, Journal of Child Language 12: 271-296.

Marchman, Virginia and Elizabeth Bates. 1994. “Continuity in lexical and morphological development; A test of the critical mass hypothesis”, Journal of Child Language 21: 339-366.

Meisel, Jürgen. 1990. “Grammatical development in the simultaneous acquisition of the two first languages”, in: Meisel, Jürgen (ed.), Two first Meisel, Jürgen. 2000. “Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children”, in: L. Wei (ed.), The bilingualism reader, pp. 344-369. London: Routledge.

Meisel Jürgen. 2004. “The bilingual child”, in: Bhatia, Tej K. and William C. Ritchie (eds.). The handbook of bilingualism, pp. 91-113. Blackwell Publishing. Müller, Natasha. 1998. “Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition”, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1(3): 151-171. Paradis, Johanne and Fred Genesee. 1996. “Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children; Autonomous or interdependent?”, Studies in second language Acquisition 18: 1-15.

Paradis, Michel. 2004. A neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Renzi, Lorenzi, Gianpaolo Salvi, and Anna Cardinaletti. 2001. Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione. 3 vols. Bologna: II Mulino.

Salvi, Gianpaolo and Laura Vanelli. 2004. Nuova grammatica italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Schlyter, Suzanne. 1993. “The weaker language in bilingual Swedish-French children”, in: K. Hyltenstam and A. Viberg (eds), Progression and Regression in language, pp. 289-308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Serratrice, Ludovica. 2001. “The emergence of verbal morphology and the lead-lag pattern issue in bilingual acquisition”, in: Cenoz, J. and F. Genesee (eds), Trends in bilingual acquisition, pp. 43-70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Sinka, Indra. 2001. “The search for cross-linguistic influences in the language of young Latvian-English bilinguals”, in: Susanne Döpke (ed.), Crosslinguistic structures in simultaneous bilingualism, pp. 149-174. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Sneddon, James, N. 2006. Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Sneddon James N., Alexander Adelaar, Dwi Noverini Djenar, and Michael Ewing. 2010. Indonesian; A comprehensive grammar. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Soriente, Antonia. 2006. “Dominance and language choice in an IndonesianItalian bilingual child”, in: Vliegen, M. (ed.), Variation in sprachtheorie und spracherwerb. Akten des 39 Linguistischen Kolloquiums in Amsterdam 2004: 315-326.

Soriente, Antonia. 2007a. “Cross-linguistic and cognitive aspects in the acquisition of WH-questions in an Italian-Indonesian bilingual child”, in: Kesckes, Istvan and Liliana Albertazzi (eds), Cognitive aspects of bilingualism, pp. 325-362. Dordrecht: Springer.

Soriente, Antonia. 2007b. “Pragmatic versus grammatical coding of time; The acquisition of TAM markers in an Italian-Indonesian bilingual child”. Paper presented at ISB6 (The Sixth International Seminar on Bilingualism). Hamburg 30 May-2 June 2007.

Tomasello, Michael. 2000. “Do young children have adult syntactic competence?”, Cognition 74: 209-253.

Volterra, Virginia and Traute Taeschner. 1978. “The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children”, Journal of Child Language 5: 311-326.

Yip, Virginia and Stephen Matthews. 2000. “Syntactic transfer in a CantoneseEnglish bilingual child”, Bilingualism; Language and Cognition 3(3): 193-208.

Download

Share

COinS