The transition from nominal to pronominal person reference in the early language of a Mandarin-English bilingual child

Abstract

This paper is a first attempt in the literature to trace the developmental route from nominal to pronominal reference to person of a Mandarin-English bilingual first language acquirer `J'. This progression is seen, longitudinally, in the context of the child's overall syntactic development from age 1; 07—4; 0, to move, in both languages, through three phases: (i) kinship terms and lack of self-reference (1;07—2;0); (ii) nominal reference to self and others (2 ;0—3 ;0 ;07) ; (iii) emergence of first person pronominal reference alongside other self-referential expressions (3;0;07—4;0). These and other significant parallels and differences between monolingual and bilingual L1 acquisition in Mandarin and English are documented. Mandarin is the home language spoken by both parents and other family members while English is the language of all other environments. This is different from the one-parent-one-language situation commonly investigated in bilingual L1 acquisition. J's pronominal development follows distinct routes in his two languages, including the coexistence of two self-reference names in Mandarin only with different functions which has not been reported in the literature before. Also, in contrast with monolingual mixing in (English) case-marking (Radford, 1986) J demonstrates categorical, adult-like case-marking contrasts. We show further that this bilingual child adopts an analytic (bottom-up) approach in Mandarin but a synthetic (top-down) approach in English.