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Referring expressions in the narratives of Italian‐English bilingual children
Author(s) -
Wolleb Anna
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/stul.12010
Subject(s) - narrative , linguistics , psychology , pronoun , focus (optics) , selection (genetic algorithm) , presentational and representational acting , word order , preference , word (group theory) , mathematics , computer science , artificial intelligence , philosophy , statistics , physics , optics
In this paper, I present the results of a study investigating the referring expressions and the selection of word order in the narrative productions of Italian‐English bilingual children and of a control group of Italian monolingual children. The aim of the study is to establish whether bilingual children overproduce overt subjects in Italian in contexts of [–topic‐shift], where a null pronoun is the most appropriate option. In addition, the potential difference between the two groups is analysed in terms of the selection of the word order in contexts of presentational focus, where VS is the favoured option for Italian monolinguals. The results show that bilingual children do not overproduce overt pronouns in their narratives, instead they show a weaker preference for the VS word order.