Adjective placement in bilingual Romance-German and Romance-Romance children

Silvana Rizzi ^[1] ; Laia Arnaus Gil ^[1] ; Valentina Repetto ^[1] ; Jasmin Geveler ^[1] ; Natascha Müller ^[1]
1. [1] University of Wuppertal
  
  University of Wuppertal
  
  Kreisfreie Stadt Wuppertal, Alemania
Localización: Studia linguistica: A journal of general linguistics, ISSN 0039-3193, Vol. 67, Nº 1, 2013 (Ejemplar dedicado a: The acquisition of linguistic variation), págs. 123-147
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- While German requires prenominal position of attributive adjectives, Romance languages exhibit pre- and postnominal orders, with a predominance of postnominal order in Italian and Spanish and prenominal position in French. In light of the low frequency of adjectives in child speech, adjective order is rarely studied in acquisition. We investigated longitudinal corpora of 15 bilingual (German-Romance, Romance-Romance) children. Overall, the bilingual corpora almost perfectly reflect the input frequencies of pre- and postnominal adjective order. In contrast to monolinguals, bilinguals produce target-deviant orders with an overuse of the prenominal order in Romance languages, irrespective of language combination and language balance. Our results are in line with Economy of Derivation. According to Kayne's (1994) Universal Base approach, postnominal adjective order is derivationally more complex than prenominal placement. Costly derivations appear to be even more costly for bilinguals than for monolinguals. Consequently, bilingual children use the most economical derivation in target-deviant adjective placements.