The development of auxiliaries in Italian L2: the case of very young immigrant children

Our study focuses on the longitudinal acquisition of Italian by twelve immigrant children having different languages as hereditary languages (Chinese, Hurdu, Polish etc.). They were born in Italy (but had no contact with an Italian school before the age of three to six) or arrived in this country very young. They live in Naples and were interviewed with respect to a range of narrative tasks with no written or audio-oral texts, some of which used in famous international projects (Frog, where are you by M. Meyer, Mr Red and Mr Blue and The Finite Story by Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics etc.). According to the task, the subjects either shared or did not share information with their listener. They were observed for minimally a year and maximally 4 years, during which the same tasks were reproposed every month and a half approximately. We analyzed the verb morphology with respect to the Italian auxiliaries essere (‘to be’) and avere (‘to have’), by means of which the passato prossimo – an analytical perfect tense that Italian children acquire first – is formed. We observed the development of the two auxiliaries with both transitive and intransitive verbs through the perspective of a functionalist framework (Berman & Slobin 1994). For the intransitive verbs, in particular, we used Sorace’s (2000) gradient model for split intransitivity. Our research questions are the following: (a) is there any possible similarity between our immigrant children and the path followed by adult foreign learners? (b) do our young subjects exploit the same cognitive and linguistic principles followed by monolingual children learning Italian as a first language (cf. Lo Russo 2015)? (c) for Sorace’s (2000) gradient model of split intransitivity, is our subjects’ developmental path coherent with it (cf. also Cennamo 2008)? (d) is it possible to hypothesize any interference with the heritage languages of the informants? We will demonstrate that: our children have a contact with the way monolingual children and adult learners of Italian develop auxiliation, but they also follow a developmental pattern of their own; they do not necessarily follow the implicational scale described by Sorace; the interference with their L1 is not always ascertained. Our study will give a contribution to a domain, that of auxiliation and split intransitivity, that has never been studied for very young immigrant children learning Italian. References Berman, R. & Slobin, D. I. (eds), (1994), Relating Events in Narrative. A crosslinguistic Developmental Study, New York, Erlbaum. 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.