Abstract
Although bilingualism has been the subject of considerable research, we know considerably less about what happens when a child acquires three languages. This paper is based on a case study of the simultaneous trilingual language acquisition of English, Italian and Scottish Gaelic. This language combination is especially interesting as the three languages vary significantly in their morphosyntactic structure. The data collection for this longitudinal project occurs weekly and started when the subject was 2:3 and is on-going. This particular paper will focus on three target deviant constructions produced by the child from the age of 2:4 to present (4:5): i) ‘it-doubling’ constructions; ii) adjectival constructions; and iii) possessive + noun constructions. We examine these target deviant constructions to investigate further the relationship between the three languages being acquired. The overarching question is whether the languages have any influence on each other, if so in what way and in which grammatical domain.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Advances in Language Acquisition |
| Editors | S Stavrakaki, M Lalioti, X Konstantinopoulou |
| Place of Publication | Cambridge |
| Publisher | Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
| Pages | 309-319 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4438-4783-4 |
| Publication status | Published (in print/issue) - 1 Jul 2013 |