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L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning: The view from Romance
Edited by Larisa Avram, Anca Sevcenco and Veronica Tomescu
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 65] 2021
► pp. 203–228

Chapter 8
On the nature of crosslinguistic influence

Root infinitives revisited

| University of Ottawa | Universidad Nebrija
| Universidad de Valladolid

Root Infinitives (RI) in Spanish have an infinitival marker, while in English they are bare forms. For languages like English, the RI stage has been said to be longer and to have a higher incidence than in Spanish. Within Liceras, Bel, and Perales’ (2006) typology of an RI universal stage, Spanish is a [+Person (P), +Infinitival marker (R)] language while English is [−P, −R]. Our analysis of the English and Spanish RIs produced by English-Spanish bilingual children and English and Spanish monolingual children reveals no interfering influence from English into Spanish and no positive influence from Spanish into English, which suggests that the degree of lexical transparency of the [+P, +R] features of Spanish is not strong enough to trigger acceleration in overcoming the bilingual English RI stage.

Keywords: bare forms, infinitival markers, RI universal stage, lexical transparency, abstract features, L1-2L1 acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.RIs in child language
    • 2.1The RI stage
    • 2.2A typology of an RI universal stage
  • 3.Crosslinguistic influence in 2L1A
    • 3.1Copula omission in English-Spanish 2L1A
    • 3.2Subject omission in English-Spanish 2L1A
  • 4.Crosslinguistic influence at the RI stage: The study
    • 4.1Research questions and hypotheses
    • 4.2Data selection
    • 4.3Root infinitives in bilingual and in monolingual Spanish
    • 4.4Root infinitives in bilingual and in monolingual English
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.65.08lic
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