Research Group: Language Development and Language Development Disorders

Ergative Languages, Accusative Languages: the Acquisition of Case by Bilingual Children. Pilar Larrañaga Issue. Abstract Case is a relational category (Chomsky 1981). Word order and morphological marking are the spell-out of Case. It is a well known fact from acquisition studies (Meisel 1986, 1990) in several languages that morphological markings are missing in an early stage of language acquisition. Furthermore, non target-like word orders are allowed in this very same stage. After this period, case morphology emerges and word order is target-like. Current research has shown that these regularities are connected to the implementation of the category I in child grammar. Present work aims at showing that this is also true for both Basque (SOV) and Spanish (SVO). The prediction is that no case morphology will be used before I is implemented. As far as word order is concerned, no strong predictions can be made since both target languages have free word order.

In GrKK since 10/96 as Ph.D. student

Goal: I want to show that abstract Case is missing in the first stage of language acquisition.The activation of X-Bar and the implementation of the category I in child grammar renders Case active. The prediction is that ergative morphology in Basque and accusative morphology in Spanish should appear after the implementation of I.

Method: Longitudinal study of two male bilingual children acquiring Basque and Spanish simultaneously from age 1;7 to 4;0. Data collection was made by means of videotapings every fortnight.

Results : The predictions are so far confirmed. Case morphology is missing in both languages in the first stage. After this stage, accusative morphology is used without major problems in Spanish. Ergative morphology in Basque emerges after the implementation of I but children require a long time to master the paradigm of ergative markings.