Abstract

This volume brings together new research from different theoretical paradigms addressing the acquisition of French. It focuses on the acquisition of French in combination with English, German, Russian or Spanish and enriches our understanding of the particularities of French and the role of language combinations in the acquisition process. The chapters examine the development of different grammatical aspects (word order phenomena, adjective placement, dislocation and cleft constructions, wh-questions, DP phenomena, argument omissions and constructions with particular word groups) and use various methodologies (such as elicitation tasks, longitudinal studies and parsing experiments) to further add to our understanding of how French is acquired in different contexts. This book will be a resource for researchers and graduate students working in the discipline of language acquisition, especially those who are interested in language contact phenomena where two typologically different languages are involved.

This is a welcome contribution to the existing research on the acquisition of
French. It should be of interest to scholars in various domains including first language
acquisition, second language acquisition and language typology.

This volume is a welcome addition to research on L1 and L2 acquisition of French. It broadens the width of linguistic phenomena under investigation in this language, via stimulating language combinations. The L2 results are particularly relevant to our understanding of crosslinguistic influence in SLA, and they certainly open the door for further exciting work.

Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes is Associate Professor in Spanish at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain. His research interests lie in the field of Spanish applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and bilingualism and he has authored and co-authored numerous book chapters and articles in international journals.

Katrin Schmitz is Junior Professor of Romance linguistics at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Her research focuses on the development of French, Italian and Spanish, both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.

Natascha Müller is Chair of Romance linguistics at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Her research focuses on the syntax of Romance languages and their acquisition. Currently, she is working on the simultaneous acquisition of three first languages.

This volume is a very interesting collection of articles on the acquisition of linguistic phenomena in French as (2)L1 and L2. The authors present and discuss new processing and production data by different learner populations in various language combinations and contexts, raising new and challenging issues, both for linguistic and cognitive development. A must-read for every (generative) linguist interested in the bilingual acquisition of French.

This volume is an excellent contribution relating (bilingualism and language interface) phenomena to critical questions such as the role of Universal Grammar, transfer, and
the interaction between language acquisition and language change.