Copula Choice is Associated with Discourse Integration Skills in Spanish-Speaking Children

The present study investigates the relationship between discourse integration skills and Spanish copula choice in monolingual Chilean Spanish-speaking children. Previous research has focused on determining the age at which children associate estar to a transitory property and ser to an inherent property (Holtheuer, Carolina. 2012. Spanish-speaking children do not always overuse estar. Revista Signos 45(78). 3–19, Holtheuer, Carolina & Johanna Rendle-Short. 2013. Ser and estar: Corrective input to children’s errors of the Spanish copula verbs. First Language 33(2). 155–167, Schmitt, Cristina & Karen Miller. 2007. Making discourse dependent decisions: The case of the copulas ser and estar in Spanish. Lingua 117(11). 1907–1929, Sera, Maria. 1992. To be or to be: Use and acquisition of the Spanish copulas. Journal of Memory and Language 31. 408–427, Requena, Pablo, Astrid Román-Hernández & Karen Miller. 2015. Children’s knowledge of the Spanish copulas ser and estar with novel adjectives. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics 22. 193–207), showing that by 2 years of age children know the categorial distribution of the two copulas, but that at 5 years of age only some children, but not all children, have knowledge of the transitory/inherent distinction that often arises when the same adjective occurs with one or the other copula. The present study seeks to extend the latter research by further investigating the factors that might influence why only some children associate estar to transitory properties at 5 years of age, a question that will not only shed light on when the subtle meaning differences of the copulas are acquired, but also how they are acquired. Maienborn, Claudia (2005. A discourse-based account of Spanish ser/estar. Linguistics 43(1). 155–180) notes that estar is discourse-linked, while ser is not. Specifically, the use of estar with an adjectival predicate to compare changes to a person across different stages of their life relies on one’s ability to integrate the larger discourse (i.e., these various stages) into their statement. In the present study, to determine whether Spanish-speaking children’s production of the copula estar with adjectival predicates was associated with their discourse integration abilities, children were presented with both a Copula Elicitation Task and a Discourse Production Task. Analyses revealed an association between children’s discourse integration skills and their use of estar with adjectives to express transitory properties, a finding that indicates that children’s acquisition of estar is mastered late – at least in part because of their late development of discourse integration skills more generally. Most studies on the acquisition of estar with adjectival complements have focused primarily on comprehension. Experimental studies on children’s production of estar are rare. As such, this experimental study is one of the few that examines children’s use of estar in production and the first, as far as we know, that provides empirical support for the link between discourse integration skills in children and their use of estar with adjectival predicates.

Copulas in Spanish: Scalar structure and interpretive economy

This article analyzes the distribution of the copulas ser and estar in Spanish, based on a scalar theoretical framework. The main proposal is that their distribution can be captured in terms of the scalar structure of the predicates involved and the presence of cognitive salient points on those scales. The proposed framework centers around ser predicates involving a single degree on the scale, while those with estar involve an interval, which additionally must involve an onset, or salient point. This analysis has two advantages. First, it accounts for subjects and closed-scale adjective pairs not being able to alternate between ser or estar. The endpoints present on closed-scales act as strong salient points that, based on the Principle of Interpretive Economy, require that the copula estar is used if it can. Second, this analysis also accounts for the distribution of estar with open-scale predicates and explains why adjectives like famoso ‘famous’ or rico ‘rich’ are virtually absent from estar predications, despite having the appropriate temporal reading. Cognitive salient points are also responsible for generating the appropriate scalar interval required for estar predications, although their being weaker than endpoints on closed-scales does not require estar be the only copula available. The article also accounts for the nature of these onsets on open-scale adjectives and provides a diagnostic tool to determine which adjectives have them, and consequently can appear in estar predications.

Spanish copula selection with adjectives in school-aged bilingual children

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This study examined whether school-aged second-generation heritage speakers exhibit knowledge of the semantic and pragmatic constraints on Spanish copula selection with adjectives, and whether experiential factors affect copula interpretation. Design/methodology/approach: Following a between-subjects design, we administered 2 Picture Selection Tasks to 50 second-generation bilingual children (ages 5;1–14;10) and 21 first-generation adults living in the same community in central Texas. Task 1 included real adjectives and Task 2 novel adjectives. We administered a morphosyntactic proficiency test in English and Spanish (BESA/BESA-ME) to the children and obtained language exposure and use data. Data and analysis: Using generalized linear mixed models, analyses compared bilingual children to first-generation adults in their selection of the temporary picture with each copula ( ser vs. estar), and also examined the role of age, language exposure/use, and morphosyntactic proficiency. Findings/conclusions: Only children with high Spanish morphosyntactic proficiency approached adult-like sensitivity to the semantic and pragmatic distinctions between ser and estar with adjectives. Age, Spanish exposure and use, and English proficiency did not significantly influence performance on the tasks. Originality: This study provides the first detailed examination of the acquisition of copula selection with adjectives in Spanish-English school-aged heritage speakers living in the US. Significance/implications: This study offers evidence of the vulnerability of aspect, as instantiated in Spanish copula selection, among school-aged bilingual children. It also suggests low-proficiency children might be a catalyzing locus of the accelerated changes in copula use.

Ser and estar from the Cognitive Grammar perspective

This article explores the various uses of ser and estar in Spanish based on the assumptions of Cognitive Grammar (CG). The application of certain concepts of this model to the description of the attributive and non-attributive values of ser and estar allows us to identify a unifying thread that facilitates an integrated description of each use. These concepts and theoretical instruments include grammaticalization through attenuation, active zone, profile/base distinction, and dependency relation through correspondences, among others. In accordance with the symbolic conception of grammar characteristic of CG, we defend the idea that in their attributive and non-attributive uses both ser and estar are signs in which a basic semantic structure present in all the values can be recognized, although with different emergent nuances in specific constructions facilitated by different processes of metonymic extension. The main argument of this paper is that, in the ser/estar opposition, the marked element is estar as it contains a stative-episodic component that, be it in the foreground of the profile or the background of the base presupposed by this verb, is present in all its uses, locative, attributive, as an auxiliary in progressive periphrasis and in adjectival passive constructions. Ser, however, is a copulative verb by default, and may be associated with the notion of identification or correspondence in all its attributive uses and takes on predicative nuances both in its use in locations of event nouns and as an auxiliary in passives.