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- Bardel, Camilla
(författare)
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La negazione nell'italiano degli svedesi : sequenze acquisizionai e influssi translinguistici
- 2000
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis concerns the development of negation in the Italian L2 of a group of Swedish adults who live in Italy and acquire the language by formal and spontaneous learning. Various negative expressions and the verbal system were studied in a longitudinal analysis of a corpus with 29 recordings of seven subjects. The recordings consist mainly of spontaneous dialogue. While the development of the verb morphology turned out to be rather similar in all the subjects, the placement of negation developed differently among individuals. Contrary to what may be expected, five of the subjects tended to place negation postverbally, a position which rarely appears in the target language and in other observed L2 learners of Italian. In the L1 (Swedish) negation is placed after the finite verb in main clauses. The postverbal negation appeared mostly with the verbs essere (be) and avere (have), which is a typical distinction of verb types found in many L2 learners of target languages with postverbal negation, and indicates that the negative particle is placed before lexical and after functional elements. This could be explained with the tendency found in early stages of L2 acquisition to place negation immediately before the element it primarily operates on (i.e. semantic focus, according to our analysis). The results show that there is no obvious relation between finiteness and the preverbal negation of the target language in the subjects. Instead, there seems to be a relation between the first indications of finiteness in non lexical (thematic) verbs and postverbal negation. An alternative development was found in a learner who had studied French before coming into contact with Italian. In order to test a hypothesis of cross-linguistic influence from previously studied languages, a cross-sectional study was carried out on a group of Swedish high school students. All the students who had studied French or Spanish before Italian had easier access to the preverbal position of negation, present in Romance languages, than the students who had studied German. According to the results, the general developmental sequences found in learners of languages with postverbal negation can also be found in learners of a language with preverbal negation if the L1 has postverbal negation. In addition, transfer from previously studied languages seems to interact with more general principles of development.
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- Bernardini, Petra
(författare)
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L'italiano come prima e seconda (madre)lingua : Indagine longitudinale sullo sviluppo del DP
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis deals with the development of the DP (the Determiner Phrase) in bilingual first (2L1) and in adult second (L2) language acquisition of Italian, with a focus on a case study of Italian as a second first language. The thesis suggests that the bilingual children and the Swedish adult learners develop the Italian DP differently. The child acquiring Italian as a second first language develops Italian more like the adults, but he sets the parameters of the DP in an order different both from Italian as a first first language and from Italian as a second language in adult learners. Transfer is claimed to occur both in the boy who acquires Italian as a second first language and in the adults, but only with regard to the N-raising parameter (Cinque, 1995) in the child, and in all three parameters investigated in the adult learners. The empirical part contains three interrelated analyses. The first analysis deals with gender and number concord and development. The children and the adults differ in the order of development between gender and number: the children seem to acquire gender as an intrinsic feature of the Italian nouns. In the Swedish adult L2 learners, number is marked early, but gender remains problematic in all the recordings. In addition, transfer of the Swedish gender specification of nouns could be argued to occur in the adult L2 learners, but not in the bilingual children. The results may speak against theories of L2 acquisition where an initial absence of FCs is postulated and support theories where transfer and full access to UG are postulated. The results also speak in favour of a gradual development of phrase structure in 2L1 acquisition. The second analysis deals with the development and omission of determiners. With respect to the development of determiners, following our hypothesis concerning the setting of the Italian value of the determiner parameter (Bottari et al., 2001), determiners that are XPs should appear before determiners that are Xºs if transfer from Swedish occurs. This is borne out in the data, and an age difference is revealed. In the 2L1 children, the determiner that is an Xº (the definite article) appears before the other determiners (XPs), while in the adults, the reverse pattern is observed. Following our hypothesis concerning the Italian value of the determiner parameter, with respect to the universal determiner requirement, transfer of the Swedish value should imply omission of determiners in preverbal subject position. The transfer hypothesis is borne out in the adult L2 data, as they omit determiners in this position. The children omit determiners mainly in verbless utterances, but as soon as verbs appear, they supply them quite regularly. We argue that the adults transfer the way the determiner request is satisfied, namely with Nº to Dº movement instead of direct insertion of an element in Spec-DP or Dº. The children do not transfer this way of satisfying the determiner request, but omit determiners one at a time when their NPs are not yet arguments to verbs. The third analysis shows that word order of the DP is acquired differently by the child who has Italian as a second L1, as compared to monolingual Italian children, but in a way similarly to the adult L2 learners: qualitative adjectives are mainly positioned after the noun and possessives are only positioned after the noun in the boy who has Italian as a second 2L1 and in the adult L2 learners, whereas the monolingual L1 Italian children and the girl who acquires Italian as a first 2L1 position the qualitative adjectives mainly after the noun, and the possessive in both positions. We argue that the N-raising parameter is set later in the case of Italian as a second 2L1 and as a L2 in adulthood, due to influence from Swedish. In conclusion, the main results are accounted for if we assume that the initial state of 2L1 and L2 is fundamentally different: the 2L1 initial state is built on two lexicons, and only word order parameters may be subject to transfer, depending similarities in the surface word order in the two languages (Müller & Hulk, 2001). In adult L2 acquisition, on the other hand, all parameter values seem to be subject to transfer from L1, due to the fact that L2 initial state is built on the L1 lexicon (v. d. Craats, 2000).
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- Bernardini, Petra
(författare)
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Lo squilibrio nell'acquisizione di due lingue nell'infanzia
- 2001
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis treats the acquisition of Italian (and Swedish) in two bilingal children ad a control group of six monolingal Italian cildren (for some domains studied). It is a longitudinal study of the spontaneaous speech of the children. In both children one language is weaker than the other in terms of MLU, amount of utterances and code-mixing while speeking with an interlocutor of the respective language. The input in the two languages is also considered as a factor that may have an impact on which language becomes the weaker one. The thesis treets the development of the determiner phrase (nouns, adjectives, articles and possessive pronouns) as well as code-mixing and transfer, within the theory of generative grammar. The results show for instance that: -some domains of morpho-syntax are more vulnerable to transfer than others (i.e. determiners are not but adjectives are)and that this is more evident in the weaker language; - the weaker language has a different developmental path than the stronger language in the acquisition of adjectives;
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