Resumen de The acquisition of copula verbs in Basque by bilinguals
María Pilar Larrañaga, Pedro Guijarro Fuentes
This article focuses on the acquisition of copula verbs in Basque by Basque–Spanish bilinguals. Basque and Spanish have two copula verbs: izan and egon and ser and estar, respectively. Basque copulas are similar to their Spanish counterparts in terms of the grammatical contexts in which they are used. However, Basque and Spanish differ in one specific property, the progressive, which is built with izan in Basque. This article assumes the theoretical framework of Zagona for Basque because copula selection can be accounted for by this approach. The present study is the first one to address the issue of the acquisition of copula verbs by Basque–Spanish bilingual children in Basque; we analyze the language used in a storytelling task by 19 Basque-dominant bilinguals compared to that used by 19 child L2 Basque learners, in order to elucidate whether both groups of bilingual children use the copula in a target-like way in Basque. The study shows that no copula choice errors are produced by any of the participants with any predicates. The distribution of the predicates very much resembles the distribution of the predicates in previous studies for Spanish. Adhering to Zagona’s framework, the progressive was included in our study. In this respect, the progressive is used in a target-deviant manner, a finding that can be attributed to crosslinguistic influence. These results are ultimately attributed to children’s parallel knowledge of both interpretable and uninterpretable features, although uninterpretable features seem to be acquired a little earlier.
