The acquisition of “ser” and “estar” in 2L1 English-Spanish data

Abstract

In the early stages of both monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition (2L1), children acquiring their first language (L1) often omit functional categories (Brown 1973). In this paper, we focus on the acquisition of a functional category, the Spanish copula verbs, in 2L1 English-Spanish data. Our objectives are, firstly, to determine whether the two copulas in Spanish, i.e. ser and estar, are simultaneously or sequentially acquired; secondly, to establish whether there is a difference in the acquisition of these copulas as they appear with individual-level predicates (ILPs) and stage-level predicates (SLPs); and finally, to ascertain whether the linguistic context where the bilinguals under analysis are raised plays a role in the acquisition of this grammatical property. These combined issues have not been addressed in previous studies on the monolingual and bilingual acquisition of the Spanish copulas. Therefore, our work involves a direct contribution to the field, in that it helps to shed further light on the different intertwined processes that are involved in the acquisition of the Spanish copulas.