Chapter published in:
Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy
Edited by Naomi Shin and Daniel Erker
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 76] 2018
► pp. 245–268

Bilingual acquisition

Difference or incompleteness?

| University of Southern California
In the context of heritage languages, the term incomplete acquisition implies that the bilingual child has acquired a language system that is different from that of the providers of language input. The notion of incomplete acquisition has recently been criticized. For example, some scholars argue that grammars cannot be incomplete. This chapter addresses the critiques of the concept of incompleteness and shows, in contrast, that the outcome of reduced exposure and production of a minority language in simultaneous bilingual acquisition indeed reflects the incomplete acquisition of some aspects of the input language. I argue that incompleteness is not a mechanism, but an acquisitional outcome or a stage in language development.
Keywords: incomplete acquisition, bilingual first language acquisition, subject pronouns, tense acquisition, verb clitics, Spanish-English bilingualism
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Critique of incomplete acquisition
  • Language contact and change
  • The data
  • Subject realization
  • Tense acquisition
  • Position of clitics in verbal periphrases
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 06 December 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.11sil
References
Albirini, A., & Benmamoun, E.
(2014) Aspects of second language transfer in the oral production of Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers. International Journal of Blingualism, 18, 244–273.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Albirini, A., Benmamoun, E., & Chakrani, B.
(2013) Gender and number agreement in the oral production of Arabic heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 1–18.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Benmamoun, E., Albirini, A., Montrul, S., & Saadah, E.
(2014) Arabic plurals and root and pattern morphology in Palestinian and Egyptian heritage speakers. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4, 89–123.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Benmamoun, E., Montrul, S., & Polinsky, M.
(2013) Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics, 39, 129–181.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bolonyai, A.
(2007) (In)vulnerable agreement in incomplete bilingual L1 learners. The International Journal of Bilingualism, 11, 3–21.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Carvalho, A. M., Orozco, R., & Shin, N. L.
(2015) Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: A cross-dialectal perspective. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Cuza, A., & Miller, L.
(2015) The protracted acquisition of past tense aspectual values in child heritage Spanish. In R. Klassen, J. M. Liceras, & E. Valenzuela (Eds.), Hispanic linguistics at the crossroads. Theoretical linguistics, language acquisition and language contact. Proceedings of the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium 2013 (pp. 211–230). Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
De Villiers, J. G.
(1985) Learning how to use verbs: Lexical coding and the influence of the input. Journal of Child Language, 12, 587–595.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Enrique-Arias, A.
(2004) When clitics become affixes, where do they come to rest? A case from Spanish. In W. U. Dressler, D. Kastovsky, O. E. Pfeiffer, & F. Rainer (Eds.), Morphology and its demarcations. Selected Papers from the 11th Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 2004 (pp. 67–79). Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Fernández, S.
(1964) Un proceso lingüístico en marcha. Presente y futuro de la lengua española. In Actas de la Asamblea de Filología del I Congreso de Instituciones Hispánicas, vol. II (pp. 277–285). Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica.Google Scholar
Gutiérrez, M. J.
(2008) Restringiendo la subida de clíticos: reflexividad, modalidad verbal y contacto lingüístico en el español de Houston. Hispanic Research Journal, 9, 299–313.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Irizarri van Suchtelen, P.
(2016) Spanish as a heritage language in The Netherlands: A cognitive linguistic exploration (Doctoral dissertation, Radbound University, The Netherlands).Google Scholar
Kupisch, T.
(2013) A new term for a better distinction? Theoretical Linguistics , 39, 203–214.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T., & Rothman, J.
(2016) Terminology matters! Why difference is not incompleteness and how early child bilinguals are heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism,  1–19. Online First, CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M.
(2014) Heritage language learners: Incomplete acquisition of grammar in early childhood. In A. Enrique-Arias, M. Gutiérrez, A. Landa, & F. Ocampo (Eds.), Perspectives in the study of Spanish language variation: Papers in honor of Carmen Silva-Corvalán (pp. 435–462). Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Anejos de Verba. Retrieved from http://​www​.usc​.es​/libros​/index​.php​/spic​/catalog​/book​/747Google Scholar
Montrul, S.
(2006) Bilingualism, incomplete acquisition and language change. In C. Lefebvre, L. White, & C. Jourdens (Eds.), L2 acquisition and Creole genesis. Dialogues (pp. 379–400). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2008) Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism. Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Myhill, J.
(1988) The grammaticalization of auxiliaries: Spanish clitic climbing. In S. Axmaker, A. Jaisser, & H. Singmaster (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 352–363). Santa Barbara, CA: University of California Berkeley, Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
(1989) Variation in Spanish clitic climbing. In T. Walsh (Ed.), Synchronic and diachronic approaches to linguistic variation and change (pp. 227–250). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Naigles, L. R., & Hoff-Ginsberg, E.
(1998) Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use. Journal of Child Language, 25, 95–120.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
O’Grady, W.
(2005) How children learn language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Otheguy, R.
(2016) The linguistic competence of second-generation bilinguals: A critique of “incomplete acquisition.” In C. Tortora, M. den Dikken, I. Montoya, & T. O’Neill (Eds.), Romance Linguistics (2013) (pp. 301–320). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Otheguy, R., & Zentella, A. C.
(2012) Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pascual y Cabo, D., & Gómez Soler, I.
(2015) Preposition stranding in Spanish as a heritage language. Heritage Language Journal, 12, 186–209.Google Scholar
Polinsky, M.
(2006) Incomplete acquisition: American Russian. Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 14, 191–262.Google Scholar
(2008) Russian gender under incomplete acquisition. The Heritage Language Journal, 6, 40–71.Google Scholar
(2016) Bilingual children and adult heritage speakers: The range of comparison. International Journal of Bilingualism. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., et al.Cuza, A., & Thomas, D.
(2011) Clitic placement in Spanish–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14, 221–232.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, M., & Sánchez, L.
(2013) What’s so incomplete about incomplete acquisition? Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3, 478–508.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Shin, N. L., & Cairns, H. S.
(2012) The development of NP selection in school-age children: Reference and Spanish subject pronouns. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 19, 3–38.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Shin, N. L., & Otheguy, R.
(2009) Shifting sensitivity to continuity of reference in New York City: Subject pronoun use in Spanish in New York City. In M. Lacorte, & J. Leeman (Eds.), Español en Estados Unidos y otros contextos de contacto: Sociolingüística, ideología y pedagogía (pp. 111–136). Madrid, Spain: Iberoamericana.Google Scholar
Shin, N. L., Requena, P. E., & Kemp, A.
(2017) Bilingual and monolingual children’s patterns of syntactic variation: Variable clitic placement in Spanish. In A. Auza, & R. Schwartz (Eds.), From typical language development to language disorders in Spanish-speaking children: Language processing and cognitive functions (pp. 63–88). Springer.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C.
(1994) Language contact and change. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(2014) Bilingual language acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C., & Montanari, S.
(2008) The acquisition of ser, estar (and be) by a Spanish-English bilingual child: The early stages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 341–368.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Thomason, S. & Kaufman, T.
(1988) Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, R.
(1999) Construction frequency and reductive change: Diachronic and register variation in Spanish clitic climbing. Language Variation and Change, 11, 143–170.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, R., LaCasse, D., Johns, M., & De La Rosa Yacomelo, J.
(2017) El subjuntivo: Hacia la rutinización. Moenia 23, 73–94.Google Scholar
Trask, R. L.
(1996) A textbook of historical linguistics. London, England: Arnold.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S.
(2016) Amount of exposure as a proxy for dominance in bilingual language acquisition. In C. Silva-Corvalán, & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Language dominance in bilinguals: Issues of measurement and operationalization (pp. 156–173). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Domínguez, Laura, Glyn Hicks & Roumyana Slabakova
2019. TERMINOLOGY CHOICE IN GENERATIVE ACQUISITION RESEARCH. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 41:2 ► pp. 241 ff. Crossref logo
Erker, Daniel & Ricardo Otheguy
2021. American myths of linguistic assimilation: A sociolinguistic rebuttal. Language in Society 50:2 ► pp. 197 ff. Crossref logo
Freire, Juan A. & Erika Feinauer
2022. Vernacular Spanish as a promoter of critical consciousness in dual language bilingual education classrooms. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 25:4 ► pp. 1516 ff. Crossref logo
Meisel, Jürgen M.
2021. Diversity and divergence in bilingual acquisition. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 40:1 ► pp. 65 ff. Crossref logo
Montrul, Silvina & Carmen Silva-Corvalán
2019. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT CONTRIBUTES TO THE INCOMPLETE ACQUISITION OF ASPECTS OF HERITAGE LANGUAGES. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 41:2 ► pp. 269 ff. Crossref logo
Soto-Corominas, Adriana
2021. Acquisition of quantified partitivity in Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 11:6 ► pp. 873 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 01 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.