[SynSem] Mihaela Pîrvulescu (U. Toronto)

retour Séminaire Syntaxe et Sémantique

Mihaela Pîrvulescu (U. Toronto)

The Interpretation of Generic Subjects in the Grammars of Spanish and Romanian HL Speakers in multilingual contexts

Under Chierchia’s Nominal Mapping Parameter (NMP), languages are classified based on whether bare nouns can appear as arguments. In English, genericity in canonical argument positions, such as the subject, is expressed by bare plurals, while specificity is expressed by definite plurals:

(1) Bears eat fish. [√generic, ∗specific]
(2) The bears eat fish. [∗generic, √specific]

In French, Spanish, and Romanian, on the other hand, plural definites can be either generic or specific, depending on context:

(3) Les ours mangent du poisson. / Los osos comen peces. / Urșii mănâncă pește. [√generic, √specific]

This situation creates the potential for cross-linguistic influence between English and Romance languages in the domain of multilingual language acquisition. In this talk, we discuss the case of trilingual children who speak two Romance languages (heritage languages: Spanish/Romanian) and L3 French, with English as the majority language. We examine the interpretation of genericity using a picture-based elicited production task in all three languages spoken by the trilingual participants, to address the following research questions:

1. Do Spanish/Romanian heritage language speakers understand the restrictions on bare plurals in their three languages?
2. Is there evidence of cross-linguistic interaction in the use of bare plurals?

We analyze both the interpretation and use of noun phrases (NPs) concerning their morphosyntax (bare, definite, or indefinite determiner) and their semantic interpretation (specific or generic).