16.2179, Review: Lang Acquisition/Romance Lang: Montrul (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2179. Sun Jul 17 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2179, Review: Lang Acquisition/Romance Lang: Montrul (2004)

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1)
Date: 14-Jul-2005
From: María Cuervo < mc.cuervo at utoronto.ca >
Subject: The Acquisition of Spanish 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:47:00
From: María Cuervo < mc.cuervo at utoronto.ca >
Subject: The Acquisition of Spanish 
 

AUTHOR: Montrul, Silvina A.
TITLE: The Acquisition of Spanish 
SUBTITLE: Morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual 
L1 acquisition and adult L2 acquisition 
SERIES: Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 37 
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004 
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-71.html


María Cristina Cuervo, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 
University of Toronto

DESCRIPTION/SUMMARY 

'The Acquisition of Spanish' presents, compares and discusses an 
impressive range of morphosyntactic aspects in the development of 
Spanish as a first and second language in monolingual and bilingual 
situations. The book admirably fills a gap in acquisition literature by 
bringing together Spanish data and theoretical discussion that have 
previously been dispersed and by opening a dialogue among the 
three instances of acquisition in Spanish and other languages.

The book is organized around the main syntactic and morphological 
properties of Spanish whose acquisition has been researched within 
generative grammar. The main hypotheses concerning the status of 
child and interlanguage grammars in first and second language 
acquisition guide the interpretation of empirical data from Spanish and 
the contrast with data from other languages. The assumptions, 
predictions and major challenges for these hypotheses are discussed 
throughout the book. 

Montrul defends the view that all instances of language development 
(i.e. monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition and second 
language acquisition (SLA)) are guided and constrained by Universal 
Grammar (UG). Differences between the acquisition of morphosyntax 
in the three situations should and can be explained by other linguistic 
or extra-linguistic factors, such as phonological underdevelopment, 
performance errors, interfaces with other modules of the grammar, the 
role of the first language (L1), cognitive maturation, quality and 
amount of input. 

In Chapter 1, 'Theoretical foundations', the author introduces the 
basic concepts of Universal Grammar and the general approach to the 
acquisition of language that it implies. Next, the main theoretical 
questions that arise for first, bilingual, and second language 
acquisition (SLA) are presented in turn, intertwined with the alternative 
positions that frame the debate in each field and throughout the book: 
Continuity versus Non-continuity and Maturation in first language 
acquisition; the debate on the initial state in bilingual development 
between the initial unitary system and the Language Differentiation 
Hypothesis; full, partial or no access to UG and the role of L1 in SLA. 
A brief overview of the general characteristics of Spanish grammar is 
given at the end of this chapter.

Subsequent chapters are organized around areas of Spanish clause 
structure: the noun phrase, functional verbal projections, expression 
of subjects and objects, the left periphery and the verbal phrase. 
Every chapter is organized in the same fashion. First, the author 
presents a description and theoretical approach to the grammatical 
issues whose acquisition is to be discussed in the chapter. Secondly, 
she formulates the main questions that the grammatical aspect poses 
for first language acquisition, and presents a critical discussion of 
research results and how they bear on the relevant alternative 
theoretical approaches to acquisition. She next discusses any relevant 
research in early bilingualism. The next section addresses theoretical 
and empirical discussion in second language acquisition. Each 
chapter closes with a summary of developmental facts, stressing the 
similarities and differences between the three instances of acquisition. 
How results considered all together bear on theoretical issues of 
acquisition is sometimes discussed in this concluding section.  

Chapter 2, 'Morphosyntax of the noun phrase', focuses on the 
acquisition of several properties of the Spanish determiner phrase 
(DP). This includes the critical evaluation of studies on production and 
knowledge of determiners and protodeterminers, noun-drop, word 
order, gender and number agreement and the interrelation among 
them. Research on bilingual children and adult SLA compare 
acquisition in Spanish to Basque, English and German. 

In Chapter 3, 'Morphosyntax of the verb phrase', Montrul presents 
and discusses findings in the acquisition of tense, finiteness, aspect 
and mood. The acquisition of these elements of a clause involve the 
acquisition of abstract features and functional projections, inflectional 
morphology, their semantics and their syntactic consequences (e.g. 
subject agreement, verb movement). Cross linguistic comparisons 
include Basque, Catalan, French, English and other Germanic 
languages.

In Chapter 4, 'Subject and object pronouns', the acquisition of the 
parameters that constrain subject and object expression is discussed. 
The areas investigated in monolingual and bilingual child acquisition 
and in adult SLA include null subjects, direct and indirect object clitics 
(their distribution, morphology and placement), null objects, and 
knowledge of binding. Languages other than Spanish investigated in 
bilingual situations and as L1 in SLA are French, English, Basque, 
Korean, Cantonese, Danish and Swedish. The effect of dialectal 
variation in Spanish is also addressed, particularly for null subjects. 

Chapter 5, 'Topics, questions, embedding, and movement', centres on 
the acquisition of the top layers of clause structure, which are taken to 
provide the interface between syntax and pragmatics. Studies 
reviewed concern the projection of the complementizer phrase (CP), 
wh-movement, negation, imperatives, relative clauses, topic and 
focus.  Language comparisons include English, French, Basque and 
Quechua.

Chapter 6, 'Verb meaning and lexical parameters'  examines argument 
structure and how it is projected or constructed in the syntax, as well 
as its morphological expression (the author refers to these issues 
as "aspects of lexical semantics"). The aspects tested in children and 
adults reviewed in this chapter include the knowledge of the distinction 
between unaccusatives and unergatives, the transitivity alternation 
(causative/inchoative) and of their syntactic consequences, 
multifunctional clitics ('se' and dative clitics), the semantics and 
morphosyntax of psych-predicates, and the compounding parameter. 
Data analyzed come from Spanish, English, Italian, Catalan, Turkish 
and French.

Throughout the book, the debate is framed within the central 
opposition between the Continuity (Pinker 1984, 1989) and No 
Continuity views. The different hypotheses developed within 
generative grammar that represent this opposition in each instance of 
acquisition are discussed and evaluated against the available data. 
Occasionally, hypotheses put forward from other approaches are also 
addressed.  Besides the general approaches to acquisition, some of 
the other more specific hypotheses and views discussed in the book 
are the Optional Infinitive Stage, the Truncation Hypothesis, Aspect 
before Tense Hypothesis, Lexical Aspect Hypothesis, Missing Surface 
Inflection Hypothesis, Delay of principle B Effect, Semantic 
Bootstrapping, and Syntactic Bootstrapping. 

The book closes with a general discussion of the empirical data and 
how they inform theories of language acquisition. By and large, 
Spanish acquisition data evidences early presence of functional 
categories, syntactic knowledge and, in the case of SLA, features or 
parameter settings that are not transferred from L1. Montrul 
concludes by arguing that, taken together, results are consistent only 
with the Continuity view which, in contrast with the No Continuity and 
Maturation, is able to provide "a unified explanation of monolingual 
and bilingual first language acquisition and of adult second language 
acquisition" (p. 362). Functional categories are produced much earlier 
in Spanish than in several of the other languages studied, which might 
be accounted for by language-specific properties of Spanish (e.g. rich 
verbal and nominal agreement). This suggests that the strong 
versions of the Continuity hypothesis (Full Competence: Poeppel and 
Wexler 1993, Hyams 1996, Penner and Weissenborn 1996; Full 
Access: White (1989) , Shwartz and Sprouse (1996), among others) 
might be correct, but Montrul leaves the door open for an explanation 
of developmental effects within a weaker version of Continuity 
(Gradual Structure Building: Radford (1996), or Lexical Learning: 
Clahsen, Parodi and Penke (1993), among others). This debate also 
rests on how data are analyzed; in particular, on whether performance 
rather than competence may be the source of non-target behaviour. 
Ultimately, therefore, it rests on our understanding of how 
performance production and comprehension systems are integrated 
with knowledge of language. 

CRITICAL EVALUATION  

'The Acquisition of Spanish' is well written and follows a good and 
consistent organization of the data and theoretical issues. The general and 
chapter-internal organization of the book, the subject and author 
indexes, and cross-referencing make it not only reader-friendly but 
also flexible for readers of diverse interests. The book can be read as 
a whole, or one may choose a grammatical phenomenon and follow it 
in the three instances of language acquisition. Alternatively, a reader 
may focus on one debate in one of the acquisition situations and 
follow it across the different sets of empirical data.

The descriptive presentation of the grammatical issues at the 
beginning of each chapter is useful even for readers familiar with the 
facts, since they are presented together with some of the current 
debates they produce within generative linguistics. In these 
descriptions of a large set of Spanish data, there are very few 
inaccuracies or inconsistencies ("genitive adjectives do not agree in 
gender" (p. 34), which disregards first person plural 'nuestr-o/-a' and 
Peninsular Spanish second plural 'vuestr-o/-a'); dative arguments -
which are always preceded by 'a' in Spanish- are sometimes 
presented as PPs (p. 312) and sometimes as DPs (p. 340-342); the 
context for plural allomorphy is not fully accurate: it mentions that the 
zero plural allomorph is used for multisyllabic words ending in -s, a 
statement that should be qualified to include only multisyllabic words 
that do not have stress on the last syllable (giving 'crisis' --> 'crisis' 
but 'país' --> 'países')). However, only the latter might somewhat 
obscure the discussion of acquisition data presented later (page 57).  

Although the book is not presented as an introduction to the issues 
discussed, a brief description of some of the tests and techniques 
common to the field (such as the 'wug' test, p. 56-57), would have 
made it more accessible to readers less familiar with acquisition 
literature.

In the search for possible explanations of developmental effects in 
child language and adult interlanguage, the role of frequency is only 
very occasionally discussed, probably because the papers reviewed in 
the book do not address the issue themselves. In turn, this might 
reflect, on the one hand, the fact that in many cases there are no 
frequency data available for the aspects under study, and, on the 
other, that lexical and construction frequency effects have only quite 
recently started to be considered seriously -and not incompatible with 
UG-in psycholinguistic research within generative grammar (see, for 
instance,  Demuth et al. (2005) and citations therein). The book would 
benefit, though, from an acknowledgement of the debate or an 
indication of cases in which it might be valuable to test for correlations 
between experimental results and frequency as a possible account of 
developmental facts (something that the author does for other non-
linguistic factors).   

Montrul's book brings together an impressive set of results from 
different sources (several of which are not written in English), 
generating a dialogue among studies that did not necessarily refer to 
each other. Additionally, Montrul provides a review of observational 
data from CHILDES to compensate for the lack of studies in the area 
of child acquisition of argument structure alternations in Spanish (p. 
318-320). 

Overall, Montrul's "The Acquisition of Spanish" is a valuable book for 
anyone interested in theoretical and developmental issues of 
acquisition in Spanish and other languages. For those interested 
mostly in one of the fields (first, second language or bilingual 
acquisition), it serves as an excellent window into the discussion of 
parallel issues in the other related areas. This book can also be of 
interest to theoretical linguists since data from acquisition, especially 
when considered as carefully as in this book, broaden the empirical 
base for the construction and evaluation of approaches to 
morphosyntactic knowledge and representation.  

Montrul 'warns' us that this is neither an introductory overview nor a 
textbook, probably because of the previous knowledge it presupposes 
and because it clearly assumes and argues for a particular approach. 
However, I think her book would work as a fantastic reference and 
source of data and discussion for acquisition courses in which 
students have some previous knowledge of generative linguistics and 
previous or supplemented knowledge of methodology in 
psycholinguistic research.  

REFERENCES 

Clahsen, H., T. Parodi and M. Penke (1993). Functional categories in 
early child German. Language Acquisition 3: 395-429. 

Demuth, K., M. Machobane, F. Moloi and C. Odato (2005). Learning 
animacy hierarchy effects in Sesotho double object applicatives. 
Language 81: 421-447.

Hyams, N. (1996). The underspecification of functional categories in 
early grammar. In Generative Perspectives on Language Acquisition, 
H. Clahsen (ed.), 91-128. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Penner, Z. and J. Weissenborn. (1996). Strong continuity, parameter 
setting and the trigger hierarchy: On the acquisition of the DP in 
Bernese Swiss German and High German. In Generative Perspectives 
on Language Acquisition, ed. H. Clahsen, 161-200. Amsterdam: John 
Benjamins.

Pinker, S. (1984). Language Learnability and Language Development. 
Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Press.

Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition. The Acquisition of 
Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Poeppel, D.  and K. Wexler (1993). The full competence hypothesis of 
clause structure in early German. Language 69: 1-33.  

Radford, A.  (1996).  Towards a structure-building model of 
acquisition.  In Generative Perspectives on Language Acquisition, ed. 
H. Clahsen, 43-90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Schwartz, B. and R. Sprouse (1996).  L2 cognitive states and the full 
transfer/full access hypothesis.  Second Language Research 12: 40-72.

White, L. (1989)  Universal Grammar and Second Language 
Acquisition.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER 

María Cristina Cuervo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of 
Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Her research 
interests include syntax and morphology at the level of 
argument/event structure and their relation with semantics (with 
particular focus on dative arguments, applicatives, objects, clitics and 
the construction of verbal meanings), and the acquisition of 
morphosyntax in Spanish as a first and second language.





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