Agenda

Relatore: Silvia Perpinan (University of Western Ontario)

Abstract

Previous studies on the acquisition of the partitive clitics in Catalan (Gavarró, Mata & Ribera, 2006), and other Romance languages such as French and Italian (Gavarró, Guasti, Turell, Prévost, Belletti, Cilibrasi, Delage & Vernice, 2011) have observed that the partitive clitic usually appears after the direct object clitic, with a period of optional omission that practically disappears by the age of 5. The clitic en in other contexts such as in oblique arguments (parlar-ne, ‘to talk about something’) has hardly been investigated. Furthermore, until recently, the context of bilingualism had not been factored in the study of Catalan clitics. Perpiñan (2016) investigated the acquisition of adverbial clitics in L2 Catalan, and found that omission rates of partitive and oblique en were very high in simultaneous and sequential bilinguals, resulting in a fossilized (Lardiere, 1998, 1999) or incomplete grammar (Ezeizabarrena, 2012). Tarrés & Bel (2017), in a study of Catalan child L2 acquisition (age at testing time: 9-12 years old) found that L1 Portuguese and L1 French speakers had high rates of omission of the partitive clitic en, comparable, though, to those of young native speakers of Catalan in the Andorrean context. They also found a slight role of transfer as L1 French speakers produced the clitic en more often than Portuguese speakers. Both of these studies attested that among the so-called Catalan adverbial clitics (locative, oblique and partitive), -none of them present in the grammar of Spanish-, partitive clitics are the most robust in the grammars of both, native Catalan speakers and bilinguals alike.

Given these findings, this study questions whether the high omission rates of partitive and oblique en found in different types of adult bilingual grammars (simultaneous, sequential, more dominant in Spanish, balanced bilinguals, etc) are the result of incomplete acquisition in early childhood, fossilization of the grammar at some point in the development, or posterior language attrition in adulthood. We also question at which point in the development of these grammars we start seeing differences among groups, and whether these are due to language use, onset of bilingualism, the role of input, or a combination of these.

This talk will present data from adult (n= 60) and child (n= 150, ages 4-9) speakers of Catalan with different bilingualism profiles (Catalan-dominant, Balanced Bilingual, Spanish-dominant). The data have been collected with an Acceptability Judgment Task (only for adults), and two Oral Production Tasks that I will explain in detail. Data Coding have been done according to the structure provided by person. Bilingualism profile has been calculated with the results on an exhaustive linguistic background questionnaire on quantity and quality of input, onset of bilingualism, fluency, parents’ evaluation, and linguistic history. The results of the partitive and oblique en clitic clearly indicated significant differences among groups but not so much across ages. These results show that the clitic en is acquired very late in bilingualism, after 9-10 years of age, and can remain incomplete and present optionality in the grammar of a bilingual speaker.