[DOWNLOAD] "Case Systems in Contact: Syntactic and Lexical Case in Bilingual Child Language." by Southwest Journal of Linguistics # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Case Systems in Contact: Syntactic and Lexical Case in Bilingual Child Language.
- Author : Southwest Journal of Linguistics
- Release Date : January 01, 2002
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 278 KB
Description
ABSTRACT. This study examined effects of language contact and attrition on the Hungarian morphological case system in Hungarian-English bilingual children's speech production. To discover whether lexico-semantic and grammatical features are equally vulnerable in bilingual contact, the study compared patterns of change in case morphemes that express semantic relations with patterns of change in one that expresses a syntactic relation. Drawing on a lexically-based approach to production, an analysis of naturally-occurring data showed clear differences in both relative accuracy and pre-dominant error types between case morphemes that mark lexico-semantic information (local cases) and the case marker of the syntactic object (accusative). Overall, local-cases are less accurate than syntactic case; moreover, they tend to show substitution errors rather than omission, which is the pre-dominant error in application of syntactic case. These asymmetries are explained in terms of (a) how and when various case morphemes are accessed in production, and (b) typological differences in morphological marking of abstract case relations. * INTRODUCTION. Recent years have seen an increased interest in the role of language contact in bilingual first language (L1) development. Considerable attention has been directed toward the early years of bilingual acquisition, addressing how and to what extent the bilingual child's languages interact (e.g. Meisel 1989, Paradis & Genesee 1996, Lanza 1997, 2000) and how cross-linguistic and language-specific factors may explain why various aspects of the weaker language are affected in different ways (e.g. Schlyter 1993, Muller 1998, Sinka & Schelletter 1998, Dopke 2000b, Paradis 2000). However, there is still relatively little empirical research available that looks beyond the primary years of bilingual acquisition to examine effects of language contact on the development of the pre-adolescent bilingual's languages, especially on the development of the weaker L1 in immigrant situations (cf. Kaufman & Aronoff 1991, Pfaff 1991, Bolonyai 1998, Schmitt 2000). Schlyter (1993:289) points out that our knowledge about 'the quality of the weaker language' in bilingual children is particularly limited. By analyzing data from primary school children whose weaker L1 (Hungarian) and stronger L2 (English) are typologically very distinct, this study examined the mechanisms that may determine how change operates in the less stable L1.