Language contact and language acquisition: remarks on the variable production of number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese

Jakubów, Ana Paula da Silva Passos

ABSTRACT

The term language contact is generally referred to in the literature on language change and historical linguistics to explain the emergence of new linguistic varieties. In this paper, the notion of language contact is extended to language acquisition based on variable input - a possible result of historical linguistic contact in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) -, considering the social factors that influence language variation and contact (Mufwene, 2001Mufwene, S. S. (2001). The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge University Press., 2008Mufwene, S. S. (2008). Language Evolution: contact, competition and change. Continuum International Publishing Group.). I discuss the results of a psycholinguistic experiment carried out with preschoolers and 6^th graders to investigate their variable production of plural number agreement in BP (Jakubów, 2018Jakubów, A. P. S. P. (2018). Language acquisition based on variable input The case of number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese. Tese de doutorado, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil. http://www.dbd.puc-rio.br/pergamum/biblioteca/php/mostrateses.php?open=1&arqtese=1412307_2018_Indice.html
http://www.dbd.puc-rio.br/pergamum/bibli... ; Jakubów & Corrêa, 2019bJakubów, A. P. S. P., & Corrêa, L. M. S. (2019b). Variation under a psycholinguistic perspective: Number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese and the impact of schooling. Ilha Do Desterro, 72(3), 101-122. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2019v72n3p101
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5007/... , 2019aJakubów, A. P. S. P., & Corrêa, L. M. S. (2019a). Grammar Identification Based on Variable Input: on the Production of Number Agreement by Children Acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. In C. S.-G. Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes (Ed.), Proceedings of GALA 2017 Language Acquisition and Development (pp. 11-30). Cambridge Scholars. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/proceedings-of-gala-2017
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/procee... ). I argue that the results support the idea that language acquisition involves intraspeaker language contact which gives rise to hybrid grammars (Aboh, 2015Aboh, E. O. (2015). The Emergence of Hybrid Grammars: language contact and change. Cambridge University Press., 2019Aboh, E. O. (2019). Our creolized tongues. In M. T. E. Doron, M. Rappaport Hovav, & Y. Reshef (Ed.), Language Contact, Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew (Vol. 256, pp. 287-320). John Benjamin Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.256.11abo
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1075/... ) and, consequently, hybrid outputs that feed the population feature pool (Mufwene, 2001Mufwene, S. S. (2001). The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge University Press.). I point out that language acquisition is part of a dynamics of language evolution and that mechanisms of diachronic language change - competition, selection and elimination - can be observed during language acquisition, giving rise to different sorts of language ecologies across language development.

Keywords:
variable number agreement; language acquisition; language contact; language ecology; Brazilian Portuguese

[1] Conflito de interesses

Declaro não ter qualquer conflito de interesse, em potencial, neste estudo.

Grupo	Número de participantes	Não-redundante		Redundante		Singular		Agramatical		Total absoluto de respostas
Grupo	Número de participantes	n	%	n	%	n	%	n	%	Total absoluto de respostas
Pré-escola pública	22	219	29,5%	102	9,8%	28	20,1%	3	27%	352
Pré-escola privada	22	163	22,0%	155	14,8%	26	18,7%	8	73%	352
6º ano escola pública B (desempenho escolar regular)	27	252	34,0%	156	14,9%	24	17,3%	0	0	432
6º ano escola pública A (desempenho escolar bom)	25	83	11,2%	269	25,8%	48	34,5%	0	0	400
6º ano escola privada	25	25	3,4%	362	34,7%	13	9,4%	0	0	400
Total	121	742	100%	1044	100%	139	100%	11	100%	1936