The acquisition of subjects in 2L1 Romanian

Abstract

The present paper charts the acquisition of Romanian subjects in a Romanian-Hungarian bilingual context, on the basis of two longitudinal corpora. The main results reveal early acquisition of subject use and relatively early sensitivity to the pragmatic constraints governing overt pronominal subjects. A higher percentage of overt subjects which differs both from the input and from what has been reported for L1 Romanian may however indicate that this is an area vulnerable in bilingual acquisition as a syntax/pragmatics interface phenomenon.

Keywords

• Romanian-Hungarian bilinguals
• subjects
• syntactic-pragmatic interface