Adjective placement in bilingual Romance‐German and Romance‐Romance children1. (22nd March 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Rizzi, Silvana; Gil, Laia Arnaus; Repetto, Valentina; Geveler, Jasmin; Müller, Natascha
• Is Part Of: Studia linguistica. Volume 67:Number 1(2013:Apr.)
• Page Start: 123
• Page End: 147
• Publication Date: 2013-03-22
• Subjects: Language and languages -- Periodicals; 400
• DOI: 10.1111/stul.12009
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0039-3193

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="main" id="stul12009-abs-0001"> <title>Abstract</title> <p>While German requires prenominal position of attributive adjectives, Romance languages exhibit pre‐ and postnominal orders, with a predominance of postnominal order in Italian and Spanish and prenominal position in French. In light of the low frequency of adjectives in child speech, adjective order is rarely studied in acquisition. We investigated longitudinal corpora of 15 bilingual (German‐Romance, Romance‐Romance) children. Overall, the bilingual corpora almost perfectly reflect the input frequencies of pre‐ and postnominal adjective order. In contrast to monolinguals, bilinguals produce target‐deviant orders with an overuse of the prenominal order in Romance languages, irrespective of language combination and language balance. Our results are in line with Economy of Derivation. According to Kayne's (1994) Universal Base approach, postnominal adjective order is derivationally more complex than prenominal placement. Costly derivations appear to be even more costly for bilinguals than for monolinguals. Consequently, bilingual children use the most economical derivation in target‐deviant adjective placements.</p> </abstract>