Subject and copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals

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First Language32(1-2) 88 –115

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403980 FLAXXX10.1177/0142723711403980Liceras et al.First Language

Corresponding Author:Juana M. Liceras, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Ottawa, 70 Laurier East, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada. Email: [email protected]

Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English–Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence

Juana M. LicerasUniversity of Ottawa, Canada

Raquel Fernández FuertesUniversidad de Valladolid, Spain

Anahí Alba de la FuenteUniversity of Ottawa, Canada

AbstractThe presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories has occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition research. In bilingual acquisition a central learnability issue has been to determine whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns. In this article, the authors analyse the omission/production of subject pronouns in the developing Spanish grammar and of copula be in the developing English grammar of two English–Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the issues of the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. The authors argue that the directionality of interlinguistic influence is determined by the need to implement core operations of the computational system and that the lexical–semantic interface is an area of the grammar where interlinguistic influence occurs.

Liceras et al. 89

Keywordscopula omission, interlinguistic influence, L1 bilingual acquisition, lexicon–semantics interface, overt subjects

Introduction

The presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories has occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition research. However, while in monolingual acquisition research the core learnability issue addressed has been whether those patterns had to be given a competence or a processing account, in bilingual acquisition the central learnability issue has been to determine whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns.

In this article, we identify two different areas of the grammar which could be the locus of interlinguistic influence between English and Spanish: influence from Spanish into English regarding copula omission in bilingual English and influence from English into Spanish regarding the overproduction of subject pronouns in bilingual Spanish. What we hypothesize is that only in the case of copula omission might there be such an influence. We have chosen to investigate these two cases of potential influence, even though there are two other logical possibilities that could be investigated: (i) the influence of English into Spanish regarding copula omission in bilingual Spanish; and (ii) the influence of Spanish into English in terms of the overproduction of null subjects in bilingual English.1 We are not going to address these two possibilities here, even though our proposal makes predictions in terms of both the locus and the directionality of influence in these two instances too.

In what follows, we discuss a series of studies which have dealt, on the one hand, with the directionality of interlinguistic influence in the production of overt and null subjects in bilinguals and, on the other, with the locus of influence with respect to the copula omission patterns in bilinguals compared to monolinguals. In the second section, we draw from Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou’s (1998) account of the null subject param-eter to provide an analysis of the production and omission of subjects at three stages in the acquisition of English by Simon and Leo, two bilingual twins (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES)2. We compare the twins’ data to Paradis and Navarro’s (2003) data from a bilingual child and two monolingual children and to Bel’s (2001) data from three mono-lingual Spanish children in order to show that the production of overt subjects in Spanish by our bilingual twins does not provide evidence that there is influence from English. We then proceed to compare these same data with the data provided by Becker (2004) to argue that copula omission in monolingual English should be accounted for as a gram-matical reflex because it is dependent on the individual-level vs. the stage-level predicate classes. We show that the copula omission patterns in bilingual English are different from those of monolingual English and argue that influence from Spanish can explain these differences. Based on the data analysed in the second and third sections, in section four we discuss the issue of the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence and address other issues that are raised by our discussion.

90 First Language 32(1-2)

The directionality of interlinguistic influence and the production of null and overt subjects in bilingual Spanish

The debate on whether the omission of subjects in monolingual child language acquisi-tion is to be accounted for syntactically (Bel, 2001; Hyams, 1986, 1996; Hyams & Wexler, 1993; Rizzi, 1993/4, 1994; Wang, Lillo-Martin, Best, & Levitt, 1992; Weissenborn, 1992) or is the result of a processing deficit (Valian, 1991; Valian & Eisenberg, 1996) has been extrapolated to copula omission by Becker (2000, 2004). However, in the case of child bilingual acquisition, the competence/processing debate has been overshadowed by the issue of interlinguistic influence. Specifically, it has been argued that while interlinguis-tic influence occurs in the case of simultaneous bilingual acquisition in the phonological (Paradis, 2001), morphological (Nicoladis, 2002) and syntactic (Döpke, 2000; Genesee, Nicoladis, & Paradis, 1995; Müller, 1998; Yip & Matthews, 2000) domains, it is the syntax–pragmatics interface that has been identified as being particularly vulnerable. In fact, according to Hulk and Müller (2000), two conditions are required for interlin-guistic interference to take place: that the structure in question be located at the syntax–pragmatics interface and that the language which is influenced contain structures that may be misanalysed as mirroring those of the influencing language. Specifically, Hulk and Müller (2000) propose that object omission occurs at a high rate in the French of child French–German bilinguals because (i) omission in German is governed at the syntax–pragmatics interface and (ii) because French clitic constructions may be analysed as instances of object omission by the bilingual child.

Following a similar line of reasoning, and given the fact that the production of overt subjects in Spanish is governed at the syntax–pragmatics interface, and that overt sub-jects are available in the input data, it has been suggested that interlinguistic influence from English might lead to an overproduction of overt subjects by Spanish–English bilinguals (Paradis & Navarro, 2003). Notice however that, in this case, it is in the poten-tially ‘influenced’ language (Spanish) where the production of overt subjects is governed at the syntax–pragmatics interface, not in the ‘influencing’ language (German) as in Hulk and Müller’s initial proposal. In other words, to the best of our knowledge, the issue of directionality in relation to the locus of the processes regulated by the syntax–pragmatics interface has not been addressed. If the hypothesis is that directionality à la Hulk and Müller will result in interlinguistic influence, a larger production of overt subjects would not be hypothesized because overt subjects in English – the ‘influencing’ language – are licensed by the computational component of the grammar. In other words, they are the result of a core syntax operation and, according to this hypothesis, core syntax operations are not involved in interlinguistic influence. As for evidence that would lead to interpret superficial Spanish input as requiring overt subjects, the lack of expletives or the pres-ence of null subjects in subordinate clauses, together with the general presence of verbal pronominal morphemes, might provide evidence to discard such an analysis. A similar conclusion would be reached in the case of the production of null subjects in the English of English–Spanish bilinguals, in that bilingual English would not evidence more null subjects than monolingual English due to influence from Spanish: first, because licens-ing null subjects is also an operation of the computational component of the grammar;3 second, because it is far from clear that English would provide robust superficial input

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which could be misanalysed as mirroring the Spanish structures where null subjects are licensed, since, in English, null subjects with inflected verbs only occur with coordinated structures. However, as we have indicated above, investigating the production of null subjects by the twins to determine whether it is different from that of monolinguals is an issue that we will not pursue here.

The locus of interlinguistic influence: Copula omission in bilingual English

Besides addressing the issue of directionality of influence taking into account Hulk and Müller’s (2000) conditions, we would also like to address the issue of the locus of influ-ence. Recently, Serratrice, Sorace, Filiaci, and Baldo (2009) have pointed out that the syntax–lexicon interface and the syntax–semantics interface are also vulnerable domains. In this article, we would like to propose that the lexicon–semantics interface may also be an area of interlinguistic influence and that the directionality of influence would be deter-mined by the language that is more transparent in terms of the lexical realization of a given semantic distinction. Thus, with respect to copula omission in child grammars, which according to Becker (2000, 2004) should be accounted for as a grammatical reflex, we would like to propose that linguistic interference might also take place when languages (English and Spanish in this case) differ in terms of the lexical realization of the two different types of predicates: nominal or individual-level predicates as in (1), and locative or stage-level predicates as in (2):

(1) Mommy IS a girl(2) My pen IS down there

What (1) and (2) show is that, in the case of English, the same lexical item (IS) occurs with both types of predication while, in Spanish, nominal predicates are realized as SER, as in (3), and locative predicates are realized as ESTAR, as in (4):

(3) Mamá ES una chica ‘Mommy is a girl’(4) Mi lápiz ESTÁ ahí debajo ‘My pen is down there’

Becker (2000, 2004) shows that the omission of copula be by monolingual English chil-dren in the case of nominal predicates, as in the examples in (5), is significantly lower than in the case of locative predicates, as in (6):4

(5) a. This is lady [(Naomi, 2;02), Sachs, 1983] b. Patsy’s a girl [(Peter, 2;03), Bloom, 1970](6) a. Lady (is) on that [(Nina, 2;02), Suppes, 1974] b. I (am) in the kitchen [(Nina, 2;01), Suppes, 1974]

This author argues that, rather than being a product of sentence length, the differences in the use of overt copula be vs. null copula be in child English are determined by the


semantic nature of the predicate: copula omission is possible with locative predicates because the prepositional phrase in (6) has aspectual value and it is the aspectual phrase that provides temporal anchoring to the sentence (Guéron & Hoekstra, 1995). This results in the possibility of using null be with these types of predicates. However, nomi-nal predicates, like the noun phrase in (5), are not aspectual and, therefore, copula be must be explicit to ensure temporal anchoring. Thus, child grammar differs from adult grammar in that, in the case of the former, an aspectual phrase can provide temporal anchoring, while the latter always needs an inflectional phrase.

As for copula be with adjective predicates, as in (7) and (8), they can be considered locative or nominal (stage-level or individual-level predicates, following Carlson’s [1977] and Schmitt & Miller’s [2007] terminology) depending on the type of adjective and on the context. Thus, (7) would contain a nominal/individual-level predicate while (8) would contain a locative/stage-level predicate:

(7) Elmo is blue [(Simon, 2;05), FerFuLice](8) I (am) hungry [(Leo, 2;11), FerFuLice]

The results of Becker’s (2004) analysis with respect to the differences between the two types of adjective predicates were less clear-cut than in the case of nominal and locative predicates and there were important individual differences among the four children. However, the individual-level predicate (7) vs. the stage-level predicate (8) dichotomy still paralleled the pattern found in the case of nominal vs. locative predicates in that more instances of omission occurred with the latter.

One could argue that, if this is the case for child English grammar, it should also be the case for any monolingual child grammar. However, according to Becker (2000), and also as shown by Sera (1992) and Bel (2001), instances of copula omission in monolin-gual Spanish and monolingual Catalan (Bel, 2001) are very scarce. Furthermore, even if copula selection with adjectives emerges more slowly than with nominal and locative predicates, it is not only that copula omission is scarce but also that there seem to be few errors of copula choice (Silva-Corvalán & Montanari, 2008). Therefore, it seems to be the case that only monolingual English data, but not monolingual Spanish data, display the patterns of omission found by Becker.

Going back to the case of bilingual children and to the possible influence that one language can have on the other, we would like to suggest that the fact that the ser vs. estar distinction forces the bilingual child to organize conceptual properties and attributions around the two lexical items (Sera, 2008) may spearhead the lexical realization of copula be not only with locative or stage-level predicates but also with nominal or individual-level predicates. If this is the case, the patterns of omission found by Becker in the mono-lingual English grammar will not occur in the case of the bilingual English grammar.

Subject omission in child language

It is a well-established fact that the omission of null subjects in child language occurs both in [+null subject] languages where it is the grammatical option, as in the Spanish examples (9a)–(9c), and in [–null subject] languages such as English where the null sub-jects in (10a) to (10c) are ungrammatical in the adult language:

Liceras et al. 93

(9) a. No puedo subir (Leo, 2;05) ‘(I) cannot go upstairs’ b. Ahora hacemos esto (Simon, 3;00) ‘Now (we) do that’ c. Hacieron un canción del lobo (Leo, 3;00) ‘(They) made a song about the wolf’(10) a. (It) roars (Simon, 2;05) b. (I) falled [=fell] (Simon, 2;06) c. (He) chased (Leo, 2;06)

While the distribution of null/overt subjects in early child Spanish (or any other null subject language) may differ from that of the adult language, as has been found to be the case with non-native speakers, heritage speakers and speakers in specific contact situa-tions (Montrul & Rodríguez-Louro, 2006; Rothman, 2009), it has been the overproduc-tion of overt subjects that has been identified as an area of clear interlinguistic influence (Liceras, 1988; Montrul, 2004; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). In other words, even if it may be the case that child null subject data contain instances of null subjects that are not identi-fied under the pragmatics and discourse conditions laid out for adult data (i.e. non-ambiguous agreement when there is a switch of referent), it is the overproduction of overt subjects that has been singled out as an area of potential interlinguistic influence, following Hulk and Müller’s (2000) proposal. For instance, Paradis and Navarro (2003) investigate whether interference from English or the type of input Manuela is exposed to would account for her subject production (see also Larrañaga & Guijarro Fuentes, this issue; Zdorenko & Paradis, this issue). Manuela is an English–Spanish bilingual child who was exposed to the Cuban Spanish spoken by one of her parents and, given the fact that the use of overt subjects, specifically subject pronouns in Caribbean Spanish, is more abundant than in the case of other varieties of Spanish, Paradis and Navarro (2003) cannot conclude whether it is this specific type of input or interlinguistic influence that accounts for Manuela’s larger production of overt subjects when compared to the pro-duction of monolingual children. In fact, in Liceras, Fernández Fuertes, and Pérez Tattam (2008), we suggest that, in the production of null and overt subjects by Simon and Leo (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES), there is no indication of explicit subject overuse. Since these twins were exposed to peninsular Spanish, it may well be the case that Manuela’s overuse of overt subjects be a consequence of the type of input that she was exposed to, rather than of interference from English. Here, we carry out a comparison of these bilin-gual data and monolingual data in order to provide further evidence that interference from English does not lead to overuse of explicit subjects in bilingual Spanish.

Null and overt subjects in English and Spanish: A minimalist account

Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (1998) reformulate the null subject parameter in rela-tion to EPP (extended projection principle) checking, which implies that the way in which the EPP feature is checked will determine whether a language is a pro-drop or a non-pro-drop language. These authors adopt Speas’s (1994) account of the distribution of null NPs in terms of economy principles and propose that a given head is projected


only if it has semantic and phonological content, as well as Rohrbacher’s (1992) generalization according to which ‘strong morphemes have individual lexical entries in the numeration while weak morphemes do not’ (Speas, 1994, p. 185). This implies that, in Spanish, checking of the EPP feature occurs by merging the verb with the DP morpheme (Xº movement), as shown in (11) and Figure 1:

(11) Pedimos el alto el fuego Ask for1st person plural the cease to the fire

This proposal further implies that Spanish verbal agreement affixes are in fact pronomi-nal elements which have a categorial feature [+D] listed in the numeration along with the verbal root. Furthermore, the Spanish bound morphemes or affixal personal markers that appear postverbally such as –mos in (11) have semantic content and are therefore [+interpretable].

In English, the checking of the EPP feature takes place by merging an overt pronomi-nal element with the Spec-TP position where the DP moves (XP movement), as shown in (12) and Figure 2:

(12) We asked for a cease fire

What this implies is that semantic features are associated with subject pronouns but not with affixes, which are [–interpretable]. In other words, in contrast with [+null subject] languages, in [–null subject] languages such as English, verbal agreement affixes (the 3rd person singular –s) are weak and, consequently, cannot be characterized as pronomi-nal elements.

TP

el alto el fuego[mosj]Pedii

VP

V’DP

TDP

V

[pedii]

D

mosj

Figure 1.

T’

a cease fire[wei ]Wei

VP

V’

DP

TDP

V

asked for

TP

DP

Figure 2.

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Thus, under this proposal, it is the Spanish pronominal [+interpretable] agreement affixes that are the equivalent of the English pronominals, while Spanish pronominal overt subjects, which are used to convey a semantic or pragmatic effect as in (13), are said to occupy a focus position (Fernández Soriano, 1989; Kato, 1999; Ordóñez, 1997), as shown in (14) and Figure 3:

(13) Ellos no piden un alto el fuego pero nosotros sí They not ask a cease to the fire but we yes ‘They are not asking for a cease fire but we are’(14) Nosotros pedimos un alto el fuego ‘We are asking for a cease fire’

The Spanish pronoun nosotros (we) in (14) is not moved from the Spec-VP position as the English pronoun we but rather it is merged to that focus position which we have labelled A (adjunct) following Kato (1999).

Based on these differences between the two languages, we compare the overall pro-duction of overt and null subjects by children who were acquiring English and Spanish simultaneously (L1 English–L1 Spanish simultaneous bilinguals) and three children who were acquiring Spanish (L1 Spanish monolinguals) as follows: (i) data from the three simultaneous bilingual children: a set of twins, Simon and Leo (Liceras et al., 2008), and Manuela (Paradis & Navarro, 2003); and (ii) data from three monolingual Spanish children: María, Emilio and Juan (Bel, 2001; Paradis & Navarro, 2003).5

Null vs. overt subjects in the Spanish of English–Spanish bilinguals

Simon and Leo are identical twins who were born in Spain in 1998. The parents, who adopted the one parent one language way of interacting with the children, were from Spain (the father) and from the United States (the mother). The children stayed mainly with the mother, who was their primary caregiver during the first three years of their lives.6 We obtained spontaneous production data from February 2000 until November 2005. Out of the 307 video-taped files, 119 are in Spanish, 183 are in English and 5 are bilingual.

We present here Simon and Leo’s production of Spanish null and overt subjects at three different stages determined both by age and MLU (mean length utterance), as

AP

un alto el fuegoNosotros

TPT’

DP

T VP

V’DPDPV

pedij mosi [pedij ][mosi ]

Figure 3.


shown in Tables 1 and 2. These stages are justified in terms of both the age and the MLU differences. The MLU was calculated on the number of words per utterance (MLUw).7

The total number of utterances included in the study as well as the corresponding MLUws for the three stages are shown in Table 2, which shows that Simon and Leo’s total production of utterances and MLUws in Spanish are very similar.

The total percentages of overt vs. null subjects produced by the twins are shown in Table 3. It can be observed that the percentage of overt subjects is only 16% in the first stage and less than 30% in both stages 2 and 3. In fact, even though the increase in the production of inflected verbs (and therefore null and overt subjects) from stage 1 to stage 2 is significant (p = .0087), the actual increase of overt vs. null subjects is not significant. This is exactly what is expected in the development of a null subject language like Spanish, which in the case of the twins, and mirroring monolingual development of the

Table 1. Data selection from Simon and Leo; Spanisha

Stage Age Transcriptions

Stage 1 [May-June 2001]

2;04-2;06 21, 22, 23, 24A

Stage 2 [January-October 2002]

3;01-3;09 28, 34A, 38E

Stage 3 [April-November 2003]

4;04-4;11 50, 51, 54, 56B

aAdapted from Liceras et al. (2008, Table 5.1, p. 121).

Table 2. Total number of utterances and MLUwa,b in Spanish

Simon Leo Total

Stage 1 510 [1.43] 529 [1.48] 1039Stage 2 654 [3.77] 756 [3.35] 1410Stage 3 1135 [4.28] 894 [3.88] 2029Total 2299 2179 4478

aThe figures in brackets refer to the MLUw.bAdapted from Liceras et al. (2008, Table 5.2, p. 121).

Table 3. Percentage of null vs. overt subjects with inflected verbs (Simon and Leo); Spanish dataa

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3

Null Overt % overt Null Overt % overt Null Overt % overt

173 33 (16) 701 251 (26.4) 698 259 (27.1)


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two languages, proceeds very differently from English, where the percentages of overt vs. null subjects in the three stages are quite distinct, as shown in Table 4.

The fact that there is no abrupt change from stage 1 to stage 2 in the case of Spanish shows that the null subject parameter is set earlier in Spanish than in English and it also shows, as we are going to demonstrate below, that English does not influence Spanish in terms of the total number of overt Spanish subjects produced by the twins when compared with the Spanish monolingual children.

Paradis and Navarro (2003) analyse the production of overt subjects by Manuela, a simultaneous bilingual child (Deuchar & Quay, 2000) who had a Spanish-speaking father from Cuba and an English-speaking mother from the UK. The parents spoke Spanish to Manuela and to each other, and Manuela received English input from the maternal grandmother and the caretakers. They compare Manuela’s production to that of María (López-Ornat’s corpus in CHILDES) and Emilio (Vila’s corpus in CHILDES), two monolingual children who grew up in Spain. The fact that Manuela is exposed to the Caribbean variety of Spanish, where null subjects are known to be overused in compari-son to the Castilian and other varieties, leads Paradis and Navarro (2003) to analyse not only the percentages of overt vs. null subjects produced by the children but also those produced by the adults who interact with them. This is in order to determine whether this type of input or English will influence Manuela’s production of Spanish overt subjects and make it different from that of the monolingual children.8 The data from Manuela, Emilio and María analysed by Paradis and Navarro (2003) comprise the ages and MLUws shown in Table 5.

The first thing that we have to note is that these children’s MLUws fall between the first and the third stages of the twins’ data (Table 2). The second thing is that the initial recordings for these children cover a younger age than the one covered by the first stage of the twins’ data. However, in addition to providing a table with the total overall produc-tion of null and overt subjects by the three children from the first to the last recording,

Table 4. Percentage of null vs. overt subjects with inflected verbs (Simon and Leo); English dataa

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3

Null Overt % overt Null Overt % overt Null Overt % overt

34 16 (32) 12 266 (95.5) 39 837 (95.5)


Table 5. Children’s ages and MLUw, Spanisha, b

Age MLUw

Manuela (bilingual) 1;09-2;06 [1.26]-[2.08]Emilio (monolingual 1;08-2;07 [1.20]-[2.12]María (monolingual) 1;08-1;11 [1.99]-[2.07]

aAdapted from Paradis and Navarro (2003, Table 1, p. 378).bIn Paradis and Navarro (2003), the child from López-Ornat’s corpus, María, is referred to as L.


Paradis and Navarro (2003) offer a description (and a chart) of the actual development, which allows us to discuss the development of both the twins’ production and these chil-dren’s production.

The totals of the null and overt subject pronouns produced by Manuela, Emilio and María (Table 6) show that the production of overt subjects by the two monolingual chil-dren was at 20% (María) and less than 20% (Emilio), while in the case of Manuela it reached a total of 35.32%. Paradis and Navarro conclude that only the monolingual chil-dren’s production falls within the range observed for that age by other monolingual chil-dren from null subject languages and refers the reader to Grinstead (1998, 2000), Allen (2000) and Allen and Schröder (2003).

The first thing we should note is that if we collapse the twins’ data from the first and the second stages, their percentage of overt pronouns would also fall closer to 20%. Furthermore, monolingual data provided by Bel (2001) for three Spanish and three Catalan monolingual children for periods that cover larger age spans than those used by Paradis and Navarro (2003), where data from Emilio and María are also included (Table 7), show that the percentages of overt pronouns produced by the monolinguals are even higher than those of Simon and Leo’s, as shown in Table 8.

The above data show that the percentages of overt subjects produced by the bilingual twins at all three stages are lower than the totals produced by these monolingual chil-dren.9 However, Manuela’s percentage is higher than the average for these children and higher than the percentages for the individual children except for Juan.10 The difference between Manuela’s percentages and those of these children is considerably smaller than

Table 6. Manuela, Emilio and María’s percentage of overt and null subjects across all transcriptsa

Null % Overt %

Manuela (bilingual) 152 64.68 83 35.32Emilio (monolingual) 289 83.05 59 16.95María (monolingual) 123 79.87 31 20.13

aAdapted from Paradis and Navarro (2003, Table 2, p. 380).

Table 7. Children, age ranges, data sources and languagea

Child Language Data source Age range

Julia Catalan Bel (2001) 1;7.19-2;6.25Pep Catalan Serra-Solé (CHILDES) 1;6.23-3;0.27Gisela Catalan Serra-Solé (CHILDES) 1;7.14-3;0.29María Spanish López-Ornat (CHILDES) 1;7-2;6Emilio Spanish Vila (CHILDES) 1;8.13-2;11.24Juan Spanish Linaza (CHILDES) 1;7.2-2;10.21

aAdapted from Bel (2001, Tables 1 and 2, p. 77).

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those reported by Paradis and Navarro (2003), although we have to take into account that the age spans covered by Bel (2001) are larger.

We have then shown that the production of Spanish overt subjects by Simon and Leo does not provide evidence that English may influence their Spanish. This reinforces the hypothesis that Manuela’s input data may account for the higher percentage of overt pronouns found in her spontaneous speech. Direct evidence that this may be the case comes from two pieces of information provided by Paradis and Navarro (2003) them-selves. The first one is that while Manuela’s frequency of overt subject use seemed to move closer to that of the monolinguals by age 2;6, the discourse pragmatic contexts of Manuela’s overt subject use was ‘strikingly different from monolinguals even at age 2;6’ (Paradis & Navarro, 2003, p. 384). In other words, exposure to Cuban Spanish (and non-native Spanish from her mother) may account for this difference (see also Schmitz, Patuto, & Müller, this issue). The second piece of information comes from the percent-ages of production of overt subjects by Manuela’s parents (60%), in comparison to those of the monolingual children’s parents, which range between 35% and 40% (Paradis & Navarro, 2003, Table 4, p. 382). But more important than this is the fact that while the percentage of Manuela’s father’s overt subject pronouns was similar to that of Emilio’s and María’s parents (around 40%), the majority of overt subjects in Manuela’s mother’s speech were overt subject pronouns (53%). This is interesting because non-native input may play a more important role here than input from the Cuban variety of Spanish. However, while it is difficult to determine at which point in the development of Manuela’s Spanish the type of input she received might have played a role in her production, it is a fact that the overall input that she received in terms of the percentage of overt subjects produced by her parents was different from that of the monolingual children, since there was a significant difference between Manuela’s parents and Emilio’s mother. This con-trasts with the fact that there were no significant differences between the overall percent-age of overt subjects produced by Manuela’s mother and father.11

Table 8. Production of null and overt subjectsa

Catalan childrenTotal no. of sentences Null % Overt %

Gisela 492 337 68.5 153 31.5Julia 379 255 67.3 124 32.7Pep 853 576 67.5 277 32.5Total 1724 1168 67.7 554 32.3

Spanish childrenTotal no. of sentences Null % Overt %

María 1545 1027 66.4 518 33.6Emilio 671 484 72.1 187 27.9Juan 204 119 58.3 85 41.7Total 2420 1630 67.3 790 32.7

aAdapted from Bel (2001, Table 5, p. 295).


Based on the above we can conclude that neither the twins’ data nor Manuela’s data provide evidence that English influences the production of overt subject pronouns in the Spanish of these bilinguals.

Copula omission in child language: Monolingual vs. bilingual data

Copula omission has not been identified so far as an area of interlinguistic influence as such, even though there are languages where the copula is absent either in some tenses or altogether.12 Thus, in principle, one could only predict possible interlinguistic influ-ence when there is absence vs. presence, as in the case of object drop which leads Hulk and Müller’s (2000) proposal. However, in the case of two languages where the copula is always realized, such as English and Spanish, the difference lies in the fact that it is not lexically realized in the same way since, as we indicated earlier, in English, the two semantic values – states and qualities – are expressed with copula be, while in Spanish, qualities are realized as ser and states as estar. This scenario is very different indeed from the one presented by the distribution of null and overt subjects in languages such as Spanish, but it implies that the semantic distinction has to be identified via a lexical choice which is semantically determined. This means that we could, in principle, inves-tigate whether the fact that English does not have this distinction would result in a delay in the differentiation in Spanish in comparison with their monolingual counterparts. In fact, Silva-Corvalán and Montanari (2008) show that even though copular construction develops autonomously in the Spanish of Nico, a Spanish–English bilingual child, there is a delay in the acquisition of estar which they interpret as a possible type of influence from English. However, it is also the case that Nico uses incorrect copulas (he appears to overgeneralize estar, as Sera [2008] puts it), a usage that has also been detected in the case of Spanish monolingual children (Sera, 1992; Sera, Gathje, & Castillo, 1999). Sera (2008) attributes this to the fact that ‘bilinguals learning ser/estar must learn to accom-modate different organizations of properties across different languages’ (p. 362). While influence in this direction may occur, a comparison of actual patterns between children’s monolingual and bilingual Spanish is still to be undertaken.

What we would like to explore here is whether being exposed to Spanish and there-fore having clear-cut evidence for differentiating state from quality predicates will influ-ence the patterns of copula omission that have been noticed in children’s monolingual English (Becker, 2000, 2004). The rationale for investigating this area of interlinguistic influence and in this specific direction (from Spanish into English) is two-fold. First, if we interpret Hulk and Müller’s (2000) requirements with some degree of freedom, influ-ence of Spanish copula realization in the patterns of copula omission in bilingual English could be expected because the locus of the two-way lexical realization of Spanish cop-ula is at the lexicon–semantics (and also syntactic as we will see) interface; and, second, because the two types of predication have to be overtly realized in English too, which implies that children are always exposed to input containing instances of copula be and the awareness provided by Spanish ser/estar would enhance the production of be. Evidence that copula omission occurs at very low rates in monolingual Catalan (Bel, 2001), in monolingual Spanish (Becker, 2000; Bel, 2001) and in bilingual Spanish

Liceras et al. 101

(Gaulin, 2008) would also lead us to hypothesize that Spanish may influence the copula omission patterns in the English of the bilingual child.

Types of predicates

Carlson (1977) and also Marín Gálvez (2000) differentiate between stage-level (SL) predicates and individual-level (IL) predicates as being the realization of two different types of sentences: sentences with a generic value where a property is attributed directly to the individual, as in (15), and sentences with a non-generic value where a property is attributed directly to a temporal aspect (stage) of the individual, as in (16):

(15) a. Mommy is a lady b. Mommy is tall(16) a. My doggy is in the toy-box b. My doggy is hungry

IL predicates can be noun phrases, as in (1) and (3) earlier, or (15a), or adjectival phrases with adjectives depicting size, as tall in (15b), colour (white), aesthetic or physical prop-erties (pretty, hard, soft), etc. SL predicates are locatives depicted as adverbial phrases, as in (2) and (4) above, or prepositional phrases, as in (16a). They can also be adjectival phrases which depict temperature (hot), emotions (angry) or physical sensations such as hungry in (16b).

This semantic difference corresponds to a syntactic difference in that IL predicates are non-aspectual while SL predicates are aspectual (Kratzer, 1995; Lema, 1995; Luján, 1981; Schmitt, 1992).13 Specifically, Kratzer (1995) proposes that IL predicates are predicated directly of the thematic subject while SL predicates are predicated of an event.14 Becker (2000) summarizes the various analyses by proposing the structures in Figures 4 and 5 for IL and SL predicates, respectively.

SC in both Figures 4 and 5 stands for small clause, the structural account of copula be as a raising verb that takes a small clause as a complement.15

IP

in the gardenJohni

I’AspP

spec

spec Asp’

EvP = event argumentAspEv’spec

is ti[+/– perf]

I

SCEv

DP PP

Figure 4.


The aspectual nature of SL predicates has led Becker (2000) to propose that children can rely on the aspectual phrase to provide temporal anchoring to clauses, which implies that their grammar is different from the adult grammar and accounts for the fact that they omit copula be with SL predicates at a significantly higher rate than they omit copula be with IL predicates. Becker’s (2000) proposal stems from Guéron and Hoekstra’s (1995) temporal anchoring requirement which states that temporal anchoring, a formal binding relation between a tense operator (TOP) in the C-domain and a syntactic tense or aspect node in the main clause, has to be established to anchor the utterance to the discourse, as shown in (17):

(17) CP … TOPi … TensePi … VP

This requirement has been argued to be obligatory for main clauses in adult grammar.Becker (2000) proposes that a main clause is temporally anchored if a (particular)

syntactic head is bound by the tense operator (TOP) in C, as shown in (18):

(18) CP … TOPi … TensePi … AspPi … VP

In other words, the requirement for (main clause) temporal anchoring is satisfied by either (19a) or (19b):

(19) a. TOP binds Asp b. TOP binds Tense

Since temporal anchoring can be satisfied by (19a) in child grammars, SL predicates will not require explicit be, and copula omission will occur with this type of predicates, as shown in Figure 6.

However, since IL predicates are not aspectual, the AspP category is not realized and be has to be present to provide temporal anchoring to the sentence, which implies that be has to be overt, as shown in Figure 7.

Therefore, this implies that, in child grammars, there will be a correlation between type of predicate (IL/SL) and copula omission. In fact, what Becker’s (2000, 2004) English monolingual data show is that this is precisely the case.

IP

a manisJohni

I’

SC

DP

spec

I

DP

ti

Figure 5. Source: Example (36b), from Becker (2000, p. 113).

Liceras et al. 103

Copula omission in children’s monolingual and bilingual English

Becker (2004) provides a revised analysis of Becker’s (2000) study on spontaneous English monolingual data from four children (Adam, Nina, Naomi and Peter) from different corpora in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). In order to determine whether children omit the copula in sentences with prepositional phrase (PP) predicates because those utterances are longer than utterances with NP predicates, Becker (2004) carries out an analysis of copular utterances in words, counting only non-copula words and separating utterances by predicate type. She states that a log-linear model of utterances separated by predicate type revealed that there were on average 1.17 times as many (non-copula) words in children’s SL predicate utterances as in their IL utterances, a dif-ference that was significant (Becker, 2004, p. 162). However, she found no main effect of copula overtness on utterance length, neither when predicate type was taken into account nor when it was not taken into account. She also found that there was no sig-nificant interaction effect between predicate type and copula overtness. This was also the case for copular utterances with adjective-SL and adjective-IL predicates. Becker (2004) concludes that a processing account does not explain the patterns of omission that she found, while the competence-based account whereby the temporal anchoring requirement can be satisfied by the aspectual phrase in children’s grammar does.

The fact that this pattern of omission seems to be constrained by syntactic principles could lead us to the conclusion that this should apply to all languages. However, this does not need to be the case. For instance, as has been repeatedly shown in the case of the root infinitive (RI) phenomenon, the RI stage is robust in [–null subject] languages but not in [+null subject] languages (Guasti, 1994; Hyams, 2001; Rizzi, 1994; Salustri & Hyams,

in the toy-box(is)My doggyi

I’AspP

Asp’EvP

Ev’SC

PP

spec

Ispec

specAsp[+/– perf]

Ev

DP

ti

EvP: event argumentSC: small clause

IP

Figure 6.

IP

a ladyisMommyi

I’SC

DP

specI

DP

ti

Figure 7.


2003, 2006; Schaeffer & Ben-Shalom, 2004; among others).16 By the same token, copula omission may be a robust phenomenon in English-like languages but not in other lan-guages. In fact, Sera (1992) found that children correctly used ser with IL predications and estar with SL predications, although they sometimes overextended the use of estar to locatives which expressed the location of an event, as in (20), which requires ser in adult Spanish:

(20) Mi cumpleaños está en mayo [(Nico, 2;7.26), Silva-Corvalán & Montanari, 2008] My birthday is in May

So, on the one hand, there seems to be enough evidence, as we have indicated above, that in languages such as Catalan (Bel, 2001) and Spanish (Bel, 2001; Sera, 1992), copula omission is far from being a robust phenomenon. While Bel (2001) does not include specific numbers, she has provided us (Table 9) with a detailed counting of the total production and omission of copula for the three Spanish and the three Catalan children in her 2001 study.17

In Spanish, ser was only omitted four times and estar none. In the case of Catalan, there were 34 instances of copula omission, 31 were instances of ser and 3 of estar, a very noticeable difference which happens to go in the opposite direction of Becker’s (2004) findings in terms of the type of predicate; namely, the Spanish children do not omit estar (SL predicates) at all and the Catalan children omit ser at a much higher rate than estar.

Hypotheses. Considering the existence of a lexical item that realizes IL predicates and one which realizes SL predicates in Spanish, the insignificant or very scarce omis-sion of copula which has been detected in child monolingual Spanish and in child monolingual Catalan, together with the fact that the locus of copula realization is at the syntax(semantics)–lexicon interface and that children receive abundant input as to the lexical realization of the copula in English, we formulated the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1. Lexical transparency does not cause interlinguistic influence. If this is the case, copula omission patterns will be similar in English monolingual and English bilingual data.

Hypothesis 2. Lexical transparency in one language has a facilitating influence in the other language. If lexicalization with estar makes the SL/IL syntactic–semantic distinc-tion more explicit, IL predicate omission and especially SL predicate omission should be significantly lower in bilingual English than in monolingual English.

Table 9. Copula omission in Bel’s (2001) Spanish and Catalan data

ser estar Total Omission

Overt Null Overt Null Overt Null Ratio

Spanish 319 4 269 0 688 4 0.006%Catalan 289 31 126 3 415 34 8%

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Data. The English data that we have analysed were produced by Simon and Leo (see section ‘Null vs. overt subjects in the Spanish of English–Spanish bilinguals’ earlier for details about the project and these two bilingual children). Table 10 shows the data selec-tion in Becker’s (2004) study, and Table 11 displays our data selection.

The first thing that should be noticed is that the monolingual and the bilingual data are perfectly comparable in terms of MLU. The second thing is that our data are much more homogeneous than Becker’s data, since the two children were of the same age when the data were elicited and we have covered the exact same period of time.

Table 12 depicts the total percentages of overt copula realization in the monolingual data while Table 13 depicts the total percentages of overt copula realization in the bilin-gual data.

The comparison of the two tables clearly shows that only the monolingual children produced significantly (p < .001) higher numbers of overt copula with IL predicates than with SL predicates (Becker, 2004). In other words, as argued by Becker, the data from the monolingual children reflect the syntactic–semantic difference between the two types of predicates and may lend support to the proposal that, in children’s grammars, Guéron and Hoekstra’s (1995) temporal anchoring requirement may be satisfied by the aspect phrase,

Table 10. Data selection in Becker’s (2004, p. 159) study: English monolingual children

Child Sessions Age Mean MLU

Nina 7-13 2;00-2;02 2.98Peter 6-11 2;00-2;03 2.84Naomi 35-68 2;00-2;07 3.09Adam 10, 15, 18, 20, 25, 27, 28 2;07-3;04 3.38

Table 11. Data selection from the FerFuLice corpus: English–Spanish bilingual children

Child Sessions No. files Age Mean MLU

Simon 15-33 60 2;00-3;04 2.955Leo 15-33 60 2;00-3;04 3.586

Table 12. Explicit be by predicate type: English monolingual childrena

Nominal predicates (IL) Locative predicates (SL)

% overt total (number of cases) % overt total (number of cases)

Nina 74.1% (143) 13.0% (115)Peter 86.4% (398) 18.9% (90)Naomi 90.2% (122) 33.3% (30)Adam 52.0% (302) 7.7% (26)% of explicit be 76.3% 18.8%

aAdapted from Becker (2004, Table 1, p. 159).


as in (19a). The data from our bilingual children show that, even though the percentage of overt copula in the case of IL predicates is slightly higher than in the case of SL predi-cates, it is not significantly higher (p = .65 for Leo; p = .67 for Simon), as was the case with the monolingual data. Therefore, bilingual English seems to be closer to monolin-gual and bilingual Spanish than to monolingual English in terms of copula omission. These data do not necessarily provide evidence against Becker’s proposal that child grammar differs from adult grammar in that only in the former can the aspect phrase real-ize the temporal anchoring requirement (TOP binds Asp), because, if that overextension happens in the case of estar (the one that carries aspectual value), it would demonstrate that in the child grammar the aspectual phrase lexicalized as estar realizes the temporal anchoring requirement.18 However, we would like to argue that these data provide evi-dence for the influencing role of Spanish in the English grammar of our bilingual children or, to put it differently, for the acceleration of the process which leads children to incor-porate the adult version of the temporal anchoring requirement (TOP binds Tense).

As for the overt vs. null realization of copula with adjectives, the results are shown in Tables 14 and 15.

Table 14 shows that the difference between the total production of IL vs. SL adjectives is not as clear-cut as it was in the case of the IL nominal vs. the SL locative predicates, even though the data show a similar trend. However, the total difference is not significant and for some children the direction is even reversed (Adam) or irrelevant (Peter). Becker (2004) notes that only Naomi’s difference in the percentage of overt be with IL vs. SL predicates was significant. It is interesting to note that while in the English monolingual data adjectives offer a less transparent picture of the proposed grammar-based account,

Table 13. Explicit be by predicate type: English–Spanish bilingual children

Nominal predicates (IL) Locative predicates (SL)


Leo 90.5% (115) 88% (22)Simon 91.9% (125) 89.2% (25)% of explicit be 91.2% 88.6%

Table 14. Explicit be by type of adjectival predicate: English monolingual childrena

IL adjectives SL adjectives


Nina 62.5% (24) 43.6% (39)Peter 57.1% (28) 51.2% (86)Naomi 93.5% (29) 52.3% (65)Adam 37.1% (35) 41.0% (105)% of explicit be 62.6% 47.0%

aAdapted from Becker (2004, Table 2, p. 161).

Liceras et al. 107

in the English bilingual data there are even fewer instances of omission than in the case of nominal and locative predicates.

These two apparently contradictory results are not necessarily so, the reason being that adjectives occur in contexts where it may be difficult for the child to determine their aspectual vs. their non-aspectual value (he is hungry, he is a hungry man). As for Spanish, while we have seen that children tend to overgeneralize estar with events, they also produce non-adult instances of ser and estar with adjectives. In the case of Nico, Silva-Corvalán and Montanari (2008) note that this only happens with adjectives that can be used with both ser and estar (and that can have IL or SL interpretations) in the adult language. Even though this comparison should again be subject to further investi-gation, it is obvious that the influence that Spanish may have in the twins’ English does not promote omission but rather a higher rate of overt copula since, as Table 15 shows, the total overt production of copula with adjectival predicates is extremely high in the case of our bilingual children, even higher than with nominal and locative predicates (Table 13). Therefore, these data further lend support to the hypothesis that Spanish may influence the twins’ production of overt copula in English.

Thus, based on our comparison of the copula production/omission patterns in chil-dren’s English monolingual and English bilingual data, we can conclude that the English bilingual data do not show the same pattern of omission as the English monolingual data mainly because the total production of overt copula is very high for both nominal and locative predicates and even higher for adjectival predicates. This implies that Hypothesis 2 is confirmed in that there are more cases of explicit be with SL predicates in the bilingual data, and also with IL predicates. Therefore, we would like to argue that influence from Spanish may accelerate the process of establishment of adult-like tem-poral anchoring of sentences in the English grammar of the bilingual children. We would also like to suggest that the phonetic transparency of Spanish estar and the avail-ability of both ser and estar contribute to the earlier projection of the IP level with both aspectual and non-aspectual predicates. Evidence that this is so is provided by the Spanish and Catalan monolingual data (Bel, 2001; Sera, 1992) and the Spanish bilin-gual data (Gaulin, 2008; Silva-Corvalán & Montanari, 2008) and, as we have argued, it is the availability of the Spanish grammar that has the same consequences for the English grammar of the bilinguals.

Conclusions

We have argued that the differences between the copula omission patterns in monolingual English vs. bilingual English provide evidence that interlinguistic influence from Spanish

Table 15. Explicit be by type of adjectival predicate: English–Spanish bilingual children

IL adjectives SL adjectives


Leo 91.4% (32) 86.6% (26)Simon 95.8% (46) 95.8% (23)% of explicit be 93.6% 91.2%


plays a facilitating role in the implementation of the adult-like temporal anchoring requirement and the projection of inflection with both IL predicates and SL predicates in English. We have also argued that the reason why the directionality of interference – which happens to have a facilitating effect – goes from Spanish into English lies in the fact that the difference between IL and SL predicates is lexically realized in Spanish. This differentiation, which determines the low rates of copula omission in monolingual and bilingual Spanish (and also in Catalan, a language whose copula system is the same as the Spanish one), is transferred to bilingual English. The directionality of interlinguistic influence would not go from English into Spanish in the case of copula omission, because English does not differentiate the two types of copula lexically.

With respect to the number of overt Spanish subjects produced by the bilingual twins, we have shown that it is not higher than the number of subjects produced by monolingual Spanish children, which evidences that the directionality of interlinguistic influence from English, where subjects are syntactically obligatory rather than being pragmatically distributed, does not occur. We have argued that this is so because, in spite of the fact that the use of overt subjects in Spanish is located at the pragmatic interface, the core syntac-tic nature of obligatory subjects in English is not transferred into Spanish. In other words, core syntactic operations in one language are not candidates for causing interlinguistic influence on the other language of bilingual children. However, since it happens to be the case that our bilingual twins had a balanced command of both English and Spanish, we do not know whether a situation of clear language dominance from English might provide different results.

Furthermore and also with respect to the directionality of interlinguistic influence in the production and omission of subjects, our proposal concerning the lack of interlinguis-tic influence in the case of core syntax (the fact that the core operation that makes overt subjects obligatory in English is not transferred) would also imply that Spanish null subjects would not lead to an overproduction of null subjects in the English of the bilin-guals. This would be so because the licensing of null subjects in Spanish is an operation of core syntax and, therefore, would not trigger interlinguistic influence from Spanish into English. In this case we would not expect a different pattern of subject omission in the English of bilinguals with respect to the English of monolinguals, because the opera-tion that makes null subjects possible in Spanish is also a core grammar operation and core grammar operations do not cause interlinguistic influence.

We have proposed that Spanish influences English in terms of a lower rate of copula omission because of what we have called lexical transparency, i.e. the different lexical realization (ser and estar) of the two types of predicates. If our proposal is on the right track, the generalization would be that, in a bilingual situation, lexical transparency in one of the languages of the bilinguals will facilitate the acquisition of the other lan-guage, specifically if compared to the monolinguals. This is the case of copula omission in the English of English–Spanish bilinguals where Spanish is the lexical transparent language (ser/estar). An anonymous reviewer wonders whether we could extend the concept of transparency to the issue of subjects: Spanish would be the more transparent language because Spanish has ‘two different forms, null and overt pronouns, for differ-ent semantic/pragmatic meanings’. In this respect, Spanish has two different sets of subjects: pronouns (pragmatic value) and pronominal agreement markers (syntactic value), and this could be interpreted as another instance of transparency where Spanish

Liceras et al. 109

would also facilitate the implementation of obligatory subjects in English (lexical transparency linked to a semantic dimension). This implies that the null subject period would be shorter in bilingual English than in monolingual English, if the other language of the bilingual is Spanish-like. In other words, from the point of view of vulnerability, English bilinguals will not produce more null subjects than English monolinguals because null subjects in Spanish are regulated at the pragmatic interface; alternatively, from the point of view of transparency as a facilitator, they would have fewer null sub-jects since, in one of the two languages (Spanish), the subject is realized by two differ-ent sets of lexical items: a set of lexical items to lexicalize syntactic subjecthood (agreement markers); and another set of lexical items (subject pronouns) with a prag-matic function. In English both functions are realized by the same set of lexical items (overt subject pronouns). However, there is not a total parallelism with the copula because the copula has no emphatic value, while the pragmatic realization of subject pronouns in English resorts to emphasis.

Our discussion raises an issue that is not related to the directionality of interlinguistic influence or to language dominance but to whether there is a copula omission (CO) stage in child language development, parallel to the existence of an RI stage. In fact, this is what Becker’s (2000, 2004) proposal implies because, for children to overcome the RI stage, the IP has to cease to be optionally projected (Hoekstra & Hyams, 1995; Hyams, 1996; Rizzi, 1994; Wexler, 1994), as is the case with the CO stage.

There is another way in which the RI and the CO stage would coincide and it is the fact that the presence of RIs has been accounted for as a developmental stage in which child sentence structure is truncated at the aspectual phrase level (Bel, 2001; Hyams, 2007; Liceras, Bel, & Perales, 2006), and it is precisely the AspP that serves as the locus for satisfying the temporal anchoring constraint in child language. Therefore, if there is a correlation between the two phenomena, CO optionality could be accounted for along similar lines as RI optionality. However, we would like to suggest that talking about an optional CO or RI stage, in other words, providing a grammatical account of these phenomena, does not exclude the need to address omission in terms of performance limitations by using adequate experimental data. We would also like to suggest that further research should look at whether interlinguistic influence occurs in other pairs of languages where only one realizes both ser/estar or where one of the languages has copula estar but not copula ser (the case of Nahuatl).

Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions as well as the editors of this special issue.

Funding

This research was funded by by the Research Services and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ottawa, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC #410-2004-2034), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, Dirección General de Investigación Científica, and FEDER (DGICYT #BFF2002-00442; and HUM2007-62213), and also by the Castile and León Regional Government in Spain, Consejería de Educación (VA046A06).


Notes

1. An anonymous reviewer suggests that since it is a well-known fact that monolingual child English shows null subjects at the first stages of development, it would be interesting to investigate whether bilingual English contains more null subjects and for a longer period than monolingual English. We agree that it is an interesting question and our prediction is that this will not be the case. However, we will not be pursuing this issue in this article.

2. FerFuLice corpus: English–Spanish bilingual twins. CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000), from http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/

3. The issue of the identification of null subjects is less clear-cut in that one possible interpreta-tion of Rizzi’s (1986) proposal is that identification, as licensing, is an abstract property of the grammar which is based on the existence of rich inflection or topic-chains (Huang, 1984). However, identification can also be construed as being semantic or pragmatic, since inflec-tion may be ambiguous and semantic features, discourse properties or processing preferences (Bel, Salas, & Perera, 2008; Carminati, 2002; Montrul, 2004; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006) may determine how null subjects are identified.

4. The parentheses indicate that the copula was not pronounced. 5. The twins’ data are from the FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES. Manuela’s data are from the

Deuchar and Quay (2000) corpus and are available in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). The monolingual data from María, Emilio and Juan are from López-Ornat’s, Vila’s and Linaza’s corpora respectively, also available in CHILDES.

6. See Liceras, Spradlin, and Fernández Fuertes (2005) and Liceras, Fernández Fuertes, and Pérez Tattam (2008) for more information about these data.

7. The averages for English were 1.23 (stage 1), 3.28 (stage 2) and 4.32 (stage 3). The aver-ages for Spanish were 1.45 (stage 1), 3.56 (stage 2) and 4.08 (stage 3) (Liceras et al., 2008, Tables 5.2 and 5.3, pp. 121–122).

8. Cuban Spanish, and Caribbean Spanish in general, is nonetheless considered a null subject language (Toribio, 1994). However, some scholars argue that the Dominican variety of Spanish should be considered a partial null subject language (Martínez, forthcoming).

9. An anonymous reviewer wonders whether this would indicate that the bilingual twins have not acquired the pragmatic knowledge yet. There is no evidence that the contexts in which null subjects are used by these children would require an overt subject. However, we think that we cannot provide an answer on the basis of these data although we have not come across any instances of so-called ‘illicit’ null subjects (Montrul, 2004).

10. Paradis and Navarro (2003) mention that the bilingual Catalan–English child studied in Juan-Garau and Pérez-Vidal (2000) had a slightly higher rate of subject production in Catalan than these monolinguals (thus, closer to Manuela’s).

11. Paradis and Navarro (2003, p. 385) used Mann–Whitney U tests to carry out the comparisons.12. Nathual and some Amerindian languages have no copula though in these languages adjectives

and nouns can be inflected. In Chinese, both states and qualities are generally expressed with stative verbs without an overt copula (in the case of adjectival predicates) or with an overt copula (in the case of nominal predicates). In languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Russian, the copula is not pronounced in the present tense, a phenomenon that is usually referred to as ‘zero copula’ (for details about the copula in the various languages see Everaert, van Riemsdijk, Goedemans, & Hollebrandse, 2006).

13. Even though the clear-cut link of stage-level predicates to aspect is undeniable, the distribu-tion of copula ser and estar in Spanish is rather complex, as many syntactic and semantic analyses have shown (Lema, 1995; Luján, 1981; Schmitt, 1992). Recently, Maienborn (2005) has provided a discourse-based account of Spanish ser/estar; Schmitt, Holtheuer, and Miller

Liceras et al. 111

(2004) have investigated whether Spanish children have problems when interpreting the distinctions between ser and estar when both options are grammatical, and Schmitt and Miller (2007) have investigated children’s ability to distinguish between the Spanish copulas ser and estar when copula choice depends on contextual properties.

14. For other accounts of the differences between IL and SL predicates see Chierchia (1995).15. According to Becker (2000), this account is based on Stowell’s (1978) account of

there-insertion.16. In Liceras et al. (2006) it is argued that the length of the RI stage is determined by the phonetic

realization of two different features in the target grammar: [P], which determines how person is marked, and [R], which refers to how distinctly non-finite (infinitival) forms are realized in any given language.

17. The children, data corpora and language development periods are depicted in Table 7. We should like to thank Aurora Bel, from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, for mak-ing these additional data on the production and omission of copula ser and estar available to us.

18. This implies that, if there is overextension, estar would be overextended to ser uses but not the other way around. Sera (1992, 2008) mentions some cases of what seems to be overexten-sion of estar but further investigation is necessary. While due to time and space limitations we cannot address this issue in this article, it is an item on our immediate research agenda. An anonymous reviewer indicates that a potential overextension of estar would go against the proposal that lexical transparency helps children build different structures for different mean-ings. We do not agree with this statement because only children can select the aspectual phrase to build temporal anchoring and this is precisely what they would be doing if they overextended estar. While lexical transparency helps, implementing the ser/estar distinction cannot be an all-or-nothing affair, that is, it does not imply that there will be no cases of non-adult retrieval.

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Subject and copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals

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