The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact Book

List of tables and figures     ix
Series editor's foreword     xii
Preface     xiv
Acknowledgments     xvii
List of abbreviations     xxi
Introduction     1
Introduction     1
Research questions     5
The ecology of bilingual development     7
The Hong Kong speech community     9
Bilingual development and language contact     12
Mechanisms of language contact     14
Summary     19
Overview of the book     20
Theoretical framework     22
Epistemological status of bilingual acquisition     22
The logical problem of bilingual acquisition and the poverty of the dual stimulus     30
Language differentiation in bilingual acquisition     33
Language dominance in early bilingual development     35
Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual development     37
Input ambiguity and learnability     44
Vulnerable domains in bilingual development     49
Bilingual development and language contact     50
Summary     54
Methodology     56
Methodologies in the study of bilingual acquisition     56
The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus and other data for this study     63
Quantitative measures of bilingual development: language dominance and MLU differentials     72
Other indicators of language dominance     81
Conclusions     84
Wh-interrogatives: to move or not to move?     87
Wh-interrogatives in English and Cantonese     88
Wh-interrogatives in bilingual children     93
Emergence and order of acquisition of wh-phrases in English and Cantonese: bilingual and monolingual children compared     104
Discussion: language dominance, input ambiguity and asymmetry     119
Wh-in-situ in contact languages     123
Conclusions     126
Null objects: dual input and learnability     133
Null objects in adult Cantonese     134
Null objects in English: cross-linguistic influence and learnability     136
Input ambiguity and language dominance     147
Null objects in Singapore Colloquial English     152
Conclusions     152
Relative clauses: transfer and universals     155
Introduction     155
Development of pronominal relative clauses in the bilingual children     162
The emergence of postnominal relatives in English      170
Accounting for transfer     174
Relative clauses in Singapore Colloquial English     181
Conclusions     184
Vulnerable domains in Cantonese and the directionality of transfer     189
Placement of prepositional phrases in bilingual children's Cantonese     190
Dative constructions with bei2 'give' in bilingual children's Cantonese     200
Bidirectional transfer in verb-particle constructions in bilingual development     216
Conclusions     223
Bilingual development and contact-induced grammaticalization     227
Contact-induced grammaticalization     228
Already as marker of perfective aspect     235
Give-passives and replica grammaticalization     239
One as nominalizer     248
Discussion     251
Conclusions and implications     255
Theoretical issues     256
Methodological issues     260
Implications for first and second language acquisition     260
Implications for language contact     261
Prospects for future research     262
References     265
Index     287
Author index     292