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Part of
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: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.11sil
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