About the Book
This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another. The thirteen contributions in this volume offer a glimpse of the diversity of bilingualism present in the Hispanic and Lusophone world, shedding light on the sheer variety of speaker communities, language pairings (e.g., Spanish-English, Spanish-Basque, Spanish-Dutch, Portuguese-Spanish-English, Portuguese-English, Spanish-K’ichee Maya, and Spanish-Ixcatec) and speaker types (e.g., simultaneous bilinguals, and early and late sequential bilinguals). The diversity present in this collection of papers, both in empirical coverage and methodological and theoretical approaches, will be of interest to a wide range of students and researchers in bilingualism and Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics.
Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Chapter 1. Introduction: Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world (by Bellamy, Kate); 3. Chapter 2. L1 effects as manifestations of individual differences in the L2 acquisition of the Spanish tense-aspect-system (by Diaubalick, Tim); 4. Chapter 3. The Typological Primacy Model and bilingual types: Transfer differences between Spanish/English bilinguals in L3 Portuguese acquisition (by Child, Michael W.); 5. Chapter 4. Knowledge of mood in internal and external interface contexts in Spanish heritage speakers in the Netherlands (by Osch, Brechje van); 6. Chapter 5. Null objects with and without bilingualism in the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world (by Sainzmaza-Lecanda, Lorena); 7. Chapter 6. The Compounding Parameter and L2 acquisition (by Marcelino, Marcello); 8. Chapter 7. Prosodic transfer among Spanish-K'ichee' bilinguals (by Baird, Brandon); 9. Chapter 8. Spatial language and cognition among the last Ixcatec-Spanish bilinguals (Mexico) (by Adamou, Evangelia); 10. Chapter 9. Experimentally inducing Spanish-English code-switching: A new conversation paradigm (by Valdes Kroff, Jorge R.); 11. Chapter 10. The influence of structural distance in cross-linguistic transfer: A case study on Spanish-Basque bilingual aphasia (by Munarriz, Amaia); 12. Chapter 11. Obliteration after Vocabulary Insertion (by Vergara-Gonzalez, Daniel); 13. Chapter 12. Bilingual production of relative clauses in languages with opposite head-complement directionality (by Ezeizabarrena, Maria Jose); 14. Chapter 13. The global and the local: Making comparisons possible (by Muysken, Pieter); 15. Index
Review :
This selection of papers from the first international conference on Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world (BHL) is an excellent overview of bilingualism in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities in both the Americas and Europe. It brings together an inspiring set of studies that include a wide array of combinations of Spanish and Portuguese with Indo-European and Latin American indigenous languages. Using diverse methodologies to address both production and comprehension and basing their discussion on experimental and bilingual databases, these essays discuss phonological, morphological, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive issues. This rich discussion also addresses issues that are central to bilingualism such as code-switching, the majority and minority status of the various pairs of languages as well as simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. In sum, this volume should be on the shelf of all those interested in the study of bilingualism in general and in the study of bilingualism in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world in particular.
The volume does a superb job of bringing together areas of study of bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese speaking regions that have historically remained intellectually distant. Combinations of knowledge from these diverse fields provide insights critical to our understanding of bilingualism as a scientific area of study, and allows for the formulation of forward inferences about the linguistic and cognitive abilities of bilingual speakers.
The dynamic and energy-exuberant intellectual atmosphere of the first BHL conference that preceded the publication of this book was a kind of epiphany of the novel ideas that were to appear in its collection of articles. As distinguished linguist Pieter Muysken remarks in the title of his contribution, “The global and the local: Making comparisons possible,” the essence of the variety of linguistic topics dealt by the authors allows a rigorous treatment of the study of bilingualism, especially that of Spanish and Portuguese, but it also includes Spanish and English as well as Spanish and Basque, albeit not omitting the influence of the linguistic contact with Amerindian languages. Thus, this book will undoubtedly become obligated reference reading for the students and researchers of these topics.
Bilingualism (and consequences thereof) in the Hispanic and Lusophone world embodies a vast topic that touches upon many subfields of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and so much more. It is particularly interesting to examine bilingualism involving Spanish and Portuguese because in their contemporary diasporas the languages have juxtaposing statuses (e.g. compare the prestige of Spanish in Spain with it in the United States), making the bringing together of studies involving these languages from as many different contexts all the more revealing for larger questions of theoretical significance. The studies in this volume touch on a significant array of potential topics, including issues pertinent to language contact studies, sociolinguistics, formal acquisition and processing to name just a few. The volume is a wonderful collection of individual studies that come together to underscore the importance of cross-disciplinary work. It highlights how studies on bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world are and will more and more be drawing on expertise and insights from various traditionally non-intersecting sub disciplines to address complex questions
Under the umbrella of the bilingual situations that emerge in several Spanish and Portuguese speaking regions, this volume brings together a compact, well worked-on and round collection of research works on the field of bilingual language acquisition. The studies cover a wide variety of linguistic topics, language-contact phenomena, research methodologies, bilingual speakers’ profiles and language pairs, and they all come together in a final chapter that points to the interdisciplinary, comparative and rich outcomes of the field. It is the first of a fruitful (and much hoped for) collection of studies from the BHL international conference series, a must-have for bilingual acquisition researchers.
The editors gathered an updated and diversified view of research on bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds that includes top-notch studies of bilingual and acquisitional varieties from different theoretical orientations in multiple language settings. Written both by experienced and promising up and coming scholars, what unifies these studies is the rigor of each analysis that, together, provide a comprehensive view of the social and cognitive processes involved in bilingual production among speakers whose repertoire includes either Spanish or Portuguese.
Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World is a welcome contribution to the field, as it provides a rich compendium of studies from a linguistic perspective on a wide variety of bilingual language pairings involving Spanish and Portuguese. This includes work on Basque-Spanish, Spanish-K'ichee', Spanish-Dutch, Portuguese-English, Ixcatec-Spanish, and Spanish-English. The variety of theoretical models and bilingual (and trilingual) types examined makes this volume a fertile source of new information on both some familiar and some less-studied and typologically distinct pairings. Issues concerning evidence for universals of linguistic structure and for the presence or absence of crosslinguistic transfer run through these works on linguistic phenomena and processes as diverse as aspect, mood, relative clauses, compounding, prosody, spatial language, and code-switching, and in bilingual types as diverse as simultaneous bilinguals, heritage speakers, L2 learners, and L3 learners.
