Language contact and bilingualism in the area of Naples: a study of auxiliary development and selection in immigrant children

Our study focuses on the longitudinal acquisition of Italian as an L2 by a group of immigrant children having different languages as hereditary languages (Wu, Hurdu, Arabic, Polish, Romanian, Yoruba, Tagalog, Wolof). Many of these children were born in Italy or arrived in this country very young but their true contact with the Italian language took place at the age of three or six when they began to attend Italian kindergarten or primary schools. All of them live in Naples and they were interviewed with respect to a range of narrative tasks with no written or audio-oral texts (picture stories and cartoons). According to the type of task, the subjects either shared or did not share information with their listener. All subjects were observed for a long period of time (minimally a year, maximally 4 years), during which the same tasks were reproposed every two months. Our purpose is to analyze the verb morphology in their linguistic productions with respect to the Italian auxiliaries essere (‘to be’) and avere (‘to have’), by means of which the compound tenses are obtained. We will focus on the passato prossimo: a form of analytical perfect tense corresponding to the first type of past in Italian childrens’ productions. We will observe the development of the two auxiliaries with both transitive and intransitive verbs. With respect to the latter, we will test the hypothesis that the selection of essere or avere can be motivated by semantic constraints reflecting the lexico-aspectual and thematic characteristics of the verbs employed by our young informants. We will adopt, in particular, Sorace’s (2000) gradient model of split intransitivity (cf. also Cennamo 2008) and will test it on our young subjects’ productions by matching the type of verbs that they use (change of location, uncontrolled process etc.) with the auxiliary that they select. While doing so we will investigate the role of cognition in the acquisitional path drawn by our data, the possible interference with the heritage languages of the informants but also the possible similarities with the path followed by Italian children for the acquisition of auxiliaries (cf., for instance, Lorusso 2015). References Cennamo, M. (2008), “The rise and development of analytical perfects in Italo-Romance”. In T. Eythórsson (ed), Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory: the Rosendall Papers, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 115-142. Lo Russo, P. (2015), “Auxiliaries and Verb Classes in Child Italian: A Syntactic Analysis of the Development of Aspect”, Working Papers in Linguistics and Oriental Studies,1: 61-88. Sorace, A. (2000), “Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs”, Language 76: 859–890.