Abstract
A prevailing mystery in bilingualism research is just how speakers of creoles acquire a second language that is only subtly different from their first. This situation arises in Australia with Aboriginal children who speak contact languages, like Alyawarr English (AlyE), and subsequently learn Standard Australian English (SAE) at school. For these students, the task of learning SAE has unique characteristics. In Alyawarr English you can ‘hit’, be ‘hitting’ or ‘hitbat’ something. To speak SAE, how do children learn to stop using the -bat ending and reconfigure the semantics of ‘hit’ and ‘hitting’ in its absence? This chapter identifies three such differences between AlyE and SAE (aspect morphology, subject pronouns and transitive marking) and explores their variable use in the first two years of school.
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Notes
- 1.
I include in this the pre-school that ran on site at the school throughout the first two field trips, and from which data from three participants were recorded. I have no data about the formal English exposure of students in the study in other early education offerings that may have been experienced prior to school.
- 2.
The data collected in the project is archived as part of the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition 2 project (http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/soll/research/past-research-projects/acla2).
- 3.
A priori exclusions are clauses with past or future reference, irrealis clauses, modals, frozen forms, imperatives, copular clauses.
- 4.
Always used with the transitive suffix -im.
- 5.
A note on orthographic conventions: I have used an adapted Kriol orthography for the home/Alyawarr English clauses and Standard English orthography for the school clauses. Abbreviations in this chapter: tr transitive; bat aspect; ing aspect; S subject; neg negator.
- 6.
While the Vbat tokens in examples (6) and (7) occur in classrooms, they are excluded from consideration because, respectively, they are addressed to a student and are part of a past tense clause, as will be explained below.
- 7.
This is interesting because it results in clauses like ‘Me, I got it pocket’ in the school data, which is clearly a case of L1 transfer. The ‘passability’ of ‘got’ as a present tense main verb (and perhaps its prevalence in past tense contexts) may obscure the more target like ‘have got’ construction.
- 8.
‘Stative’ verbs were classified based on lexical aspectual properties; this included verbs such as ‘know’, ‘like’, and ‘taste’. ‘Non-stative durative’ clauses contained dynamic verbs encoding an event or process of some extended duration. ‘Non-stative habitual/iterative’ clauses contained dynamic verbs encoding an event or process that was repeated or occurred habitually.
- 9.
This paper is drawn from Dixon (forthcoming) which conducts multifactorial statistical analyses to explore in greater depth many of the issues raised here.
- 10.
Dixon (forthcoming) also investigates verb transitivity and transitive marking.
- 11.
The evaluation of the error as an issue of oversupplied auxiliary versus missing verbal inflection (in this case -ing) is a problematic area (and one reason why this was not the primary approach adopted in this study).
- 12.
The L1 developmental literature most commonly doesn’t address ‘am’ specifically, but rather collapses auxiliary or copula ‘be’ across the entirety of its agreement paradigm. In Brown’s (1973) longitudinal study of L1 English acquisition, the acquisition (defined as a rate of 90% correct usage) of full forms preceded the acquisition of contracted forms.
- 13.
school context: Full ‘is’ [N=10], full ‘are’ [N=2], contracted ‘are’ [N=2].
- 14.
Dixon (2017) addresses the issue of individual variation in more detail, and for the other language features discussed. It was only for transitive marking, however, that individual speakers and, age levels, showed such dramatic differences from the group rates. For aspectual marking and subject pronoun there was little inter-speaker variation.
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Appendix
Appendix
Distribution of three verb forms (V, Ving, Vbat) per aspectual context, home data
Distribution of two verb forms (V, Ving) per aspectual context, school data
Distribution of three verb forms (V, Ving, Vbat) per transitivity, home [tr=345; intr=302] and school [tr=160; intr=161] contexts
Distributions of subject pronouns ‘I’ and ‘AM’ per verb form, home and school contexts
Rate of transitive marking per age bracket, in home and school contexts
Rate of transitive marking in school context, per speaker and age
Rate of transitive marking in home context, per speaker and age
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Dixon, S. (2018). Alyawarr Children’s Use of Two Closely Related Languages. In: Wigglesworth, G., Simpson, J., Vaughan, J. (eds) Language Practices of Indigenous Children and Youth. Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60120-9_11
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