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

Resumen

In the early stages of both monolingual and bilingual first languageacquisition (2L1), children acquiring their first language (L1) often omitfunctional categories (Brown 1973). In this paper, we focus on theacquisition of a functional category, the Spanish copula verbs, in 2L1English-Spanish data. Our objectives are, firstly, to determine whether thetwo copulas in Spanish, i.e. ser and estar, are simultaneously or sequentiallyacquired; secondly, to establish whether there is a difference in theacquisition of these copulas as they appear with individual-level predicates(ILPs) and stage-level predicates (SLPs); and finally, to ascertain whetherthe linguistic context where the bilinguals under analysis are raised plays arole in the acquisition of this grammatical property. These combined issueshave not been addressed in previous studies on the monolingual andbilingual acquisition of the Spanish copulas. Therefore, our work involvesa direct contribution to the field, in that it helps to shed further light on thedifferent intertwined processes that are involved in the acquisition of theSpanish copulas.