The acquisition of adverbs in trilingual children: does transfer play any role?

In this paper, we focus on the acquisition of adverbs in order to identify the role of transfer in the context of trilingual language acquisition. The trilingual data for our study comes from children born in Canada who have Romanian as heritage language and are exposed to French in school and to English as the societal language. As these children are of school age, our study provides important insights since trilingualism in children is less studied. The variable under scrutiny is the position of adverbs that conform to Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy in the adult grammar of each language. The results indicate that children have adult competence for adverb placement in all three languages. However, some errors arise in French signaling transfer of parametric settings from Romanian. We conclude that this is a non-facilitative transfer justified by the typological proximity in parametric settings between Romanian and French.

Smuggling in Syntax

One of the fundamental properties of human language is movement, where a constituent moves from one position in a sentence to another position. Syntactic theory has long been concerned with properties of movement, including locality restrictions. This work investigates how different movement operations interact with one another, focusing on the special case of smuggling. The contributions in this volume each describe different areas where smuggling derivations play a role, including passives, causatives, adverb placement, the dative alternation, the placement of measure phrases, wh-in-situ and word order in ergative languages. Other issues addressed in the volume include the freezing constraint on movement and the acquisition of smuggling derivations by children.

Adverb placement in EFL academic writing

The present study looks at adverb placement in expert writing and in first-language and second-language novice spoken and written production. The extent to which first-language (L1) transfer is still present in advanced learners’ written production is also investigated. The study uses data from one expert corpus (LOCRA), two native-speaker student corpora (BAWE and LOCNEC) and two learner corpora (VESPA and LINDSEI). The results highlight the importance of taking mode into consideration, as clear distributional differences were found between spoken and written production. In addition, while considerable differences could be noted across L1 background in the spoken data, factors such as presence/absence of auxiliary, verb type (e.g. intransitive, copular/linking) and lexis were found to be most important for predicting adverb placement in the written data. Only very limited evidence of L1 transfer was found in the learners’ writing, suggesting that advanced learners have largely mastered the distributional preferences of adverbs.

Comparing heritage speakers and late L2-learners of European Portuguese

This study compares the performance of Portuguese-German heritage children and adult L2 speakers of European Portuguese whose L1 is German with respect to two aspects of grammar, adverb placement and VP-ellipsis, which depend on a core syntactic property of the language, verb movement. The results show that both groups have acquired V-to-I and adverb placement, showing no influence of a V2 grammar. Performance in the VP-ellipsis task is more complex: heritage children produce VP-ellipsis at the level of controls, as opposed to L2 speakers; however, both L2 and heritage speakers show that cross-linguistic influence may produce a preference for pronoun substitution over VP-ellipsis in a task asking for redundancy resolution. Nevertheless, given that overall results show that heritage children perform at the level of L1 children, we take our results to support approaches to heritage bilingualism which suggest the development of an intact grammar in childhood.