Publications

Placeholders in the English interlanguage of biliingual (Basque-Spanish) children

Year
2005
Journal
Language Learning
DOI
ISSN

In this article we provide an explanation for 2 syntactic phenomena whose systematic production ha been observed in the English non-native grammar of three different age groups of 58 biulingual (Basque-Spanish) children after 4 years of exposure to English in a formal setting: (a) insertion of ‘is’ before a lexical verb and (b) insertion of a subject personal pronoun before a lexical verb. We argue that the presence of these phenomena could be explained assuming that the transfer of a functional projection ommon to the participants’ first language and a gradual incorporation of the second language lexical items involved.