Volume 17, Issue 1

The current study investigates the influence of Age, Lexical frequency, and Language background on children’s overregularization of irregular past participles (e.g., ponido ‘put’, cf. puesto ). A total of 536 past participles used in compound tenses (e.g., he escrito ‘I have written’) were extracted from child speech in online corpora from both monolingual Spanish ( N  = 45) and Spanish-English bilingual children ( N  = 2) between the ages of 3;0 and 6;11. The children overregularized 7 % of their past participles and did so more often with low-frequency participles like escrito ‘written’ than with high-frequency ones like hecho ‘done/made’ . Additionally, Spanish-English bilinguals overregularized more than the monolinguals, and the bilinguals’ overregularizations persisted with age while the monolingual children’s rates decreased with age. These results demonstrate that both monolingual and bilingual children overregularize irregular past participles in the structures of interest and that their overregularizations are mediated by lexical frequency. Further, these results suggest that children must be exposed to enough examples of irregular forms before they stop applying the regular pattern. While the monolingual children who were exposed to extended amounts of Spanish retreated from participle overregularization with age, bilinguals’ rates of overregularization persisted through the ages studied. These findings indicate that children from both speaker groups follow a similar acquisitional path of irregular past participles; however, language experience predicts their rates of overregularization, and the timespan required to master the irregulars.

While studies of lectal coherence, the extent to which speakers’ uses of multiple linguistic variables correlate, have not historically been frequent within sociolinguistics, recent studies have added to our knowledge of co-variation between variables. The present study contributes to this growing body of knowledge by analyzing co-variation of the Spanish voiced obstruent series /bdɡ/ in the bilingual border community of Rivera, Uruguay. On the basis of 5,569 tokens from sociolinguistic interview data from 40 Riverense Spanish speakers, we acoustically analyze mean constriction of /bdɡ/ for each speaker and each phoneme, taking into consideration the influence of Portuguese cognates and Spanish orthography on /b/. Results show positive correlations between constriction of /d/, /ɡ/, and /b/ (when the latter is spelled <b> and has a /b/ cognate), which is expected given the parallel social patterning for these sounds. However, the relationship between these portions of the data and the contrast of /b/ on the basis of orthography and cognates is much weaker. While one factor that could contribute to this empirical observation is methodological in nature, individual lects reflect the unique linguistic histories of their users, including who their interlocutors are, and in a linguistically diverse community, diverse lects can be expected.

Resumo Inserido no campo de estudos das ideologias linguísticas do bilinguismo, este trabalho busca analisar as concepções de bilinguismo de sete instituições de ensino de uma cidade do sudeste do Brasil, assim como os discursos ideológicos que subjazem a escolha pedagógica pelo ensino bilíngue feita por essas escolas. O estudo foi desenvolvido a partir de uma busca exploratória por temáticas recorrentes nos textos e nas imagens encontradas na página Web dos programas bilíngues dessas instituições. Os materiais foram, então, interpretados tendo como abordagem a análise crítica do discurso. Os resultados revelam três pontos em comum a essas escolas: primeiramente, seus programas bilíngues refletem uma concepção fractal de bilinguismo, tratando o conhecimento das duas línguas de forma isolada e tendo padrões monolíngues como referência; em segundo lugar, o material analisado apresenta o bilinguismo como sinônimo de uma habilidade do século XXI, essencial para a inserção no mercado de trabalho e no mercado de bens simbólicos; finalmente, a ideia sobre o que é ser bilíngue está relacionada meramente ao domínio da língua inglesa, refletindo discursos ideológicos alinhados com a globalização e com a geração de lucros materiais ou simbólicos no contexto linguístico em que o idioma está inserido.

The limited research on bilinguals’ demonstratives suggests that bilingualism may result in a reduced number of demonstrative forms in bilinguals’ linguistic systems as well as a shift in the factors that constrain demonstrative usage. The current study investigates Spanish nominal demonstrative use among Spanish-speaking monolingual adults in Mexico and two groups of Spanish–English bilingual adults in New Mexico: Adult Arrivals, who were born and raised in a Spanish-speaking country, and U.S. Raised bilinguals, who were born in the U.S. or arrived by age seven. Proximal demonstratives este/esta ‘this’ and medial demonstratives ese/esa ‘that’ were elicited using a puzzle task. All groups varied between este/esta and ese/esa. The monolinguals were likelier than the bilinguals to produce ese/esa when referring to referents farther from themselves and closer to the addressee. Whereas the monolinguals and Adult Arrivals tended to produce este/esta rather than ese/esa when the experimenter selected the incorrect referent, thereby creating a misunderstanding, the U.S. Raised bilinguals showed the opposite trend. The findings are interpreted in the context of typological research indicating that distance between the addressee and the referent impacts demonstrative usage in Spanish but not English. It is hypothesized that increased exposure to English may correspond to reduced attention to the addressee when choosing which demonstrative to use.

This paper revisits the phenomenon of inalienable possession between a dative argument and a body-part noun in Spanish. Specifically, it looks at contexts where the inalienable possession interpretation is obligatory, as in constructions containing monoeventive verbs of perception, and those where the inalienable reading becomes optional, namely with bi-eventive predicates denoting a change of state. I offer a possessor raising and applicative hybrid analysis, whereby the inalienable possessor originates inside the body-part DP and raises to the specifier of an applicative head to license dative case; the position ApplP occupies in the derivation determines the dative’s interpretation as a mere possessor (low applicative), or as an affected possessor as well (middle applicative). Alternatively, cases where the dative is not understood as the inalienable possessor but simply as affected occur when this argument is an additional one originating in the specifier of the middle applicative head, and the possessor of the body-part noun is encoded internally via a clitic or strong possessive, or by means of a genitive PP inside the DP. Thus, I propose the existence of two types of affected applicative heads: (i) one whose specifier is available for the possessor inside the possessum DP to move into to be case licensed, and (ii) another introducing an additional argument in its specifier. Additionally, this analysis accounts for the complementary distribution between dative possessors and possessive determiners in Spanish.

Resumen En este trabajo investigamos las posibilidades y restricciones de uso de construcciones gramaticales con verbos de movimiento con dirección inherente de la lengua española para denotar movimientos en el dominio del tiempo. Analizamos cuatro metáforas temporales – EGO EN MOVIMIENTO, TIEMPO COMO MOVIMIENTO DE/POR UN LUGAR, TIEMPO EN ESPEJO, ANTES ES ARRIBA – que, a priori, tienen la facultad de permitir el uso de este tipo de construcciones en el dominio del tiempo. Concluimos, no obstante, que solo las dos primeras manifiestan, de hecho, esta facultad. Además, constatamos que esta facultad está limitada por dos restricciones cognitivo-semánticas importantes: (1) el uso se restringe a verbos que focalizan la trayectoria o alguno de sus segmentos y (2) el uso se limita a metas relativas (excluyendo metas objetivas, como, por ejemplo, las calendáricas). Concluimos, finalmente, que estas dos restricciones están impuestas por las características que posee la trayectoria en el dominio del tiempo, es decir, en el dominio meta de la proyección metafórica.