Joyce Bruhn de Garavito

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor Emeritus at Western University

This volume comprises studies and keynote addresses presented at the 16th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference hosted by The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, in Trondheim in 2022. The selection of cutting-edge studies presented covers a wide array of topics within generative linguistics, including the...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

It is a very simple experiment on whether learners of Spanish know how to interpret tense.

It is usually assumed that the dative clitic in Spanish doubles indirect objects. However, prepositional phrases indicating goal, location, possession, etc., appear with clitic doubling, in which case the doubled NP is marked with the pseudo-preposition a. These cases (1a) contrast with sentences in which there is a full prepositional phrase (1b)....

It is generally accepted that we find variability in the L2 production of morphological markers of inflection. This variability has become the focus of attention in second language acquisition research given that current linguistic theory posits a direct association between the overt realization of the morphology of a language and functional catego...

There is presently a lively debate in second language (L2) acquisition research as to whether (adult) learners can acquire linguistic phenomena located at the interface between syntax and other modules, such as semantics, pragmatics, and lexical semantics, in contrast to phenomena that are purely syntactic in nature. For some researchers, the inter...

This chapter argues that generative linguistics is in a position to make available to second language teaching professionals a large body of evidence that can be fruitfully applied in many areas such as curriculum and textbook design. As an example, the chapter focuses on the acquisition of Spanish weak pronouns (clitics), showing how the current a...

This paper argues against connectionist models of language acquisition. It examines knowledge of the properties of subjects and objects in Spanish, particularly in impersonal passives and inchoatives. In both of these structures, the reflexive clitic se is obligatorily present and the linear order of elements is the same, namely [ se V NP], with ag...

In Spanish it is possible to drop nouns in order to avoid repetition. Noun drop is very productive (Ticio 2001; 2005).Given the high level of accuracy in gender concord found in previous studies (Bruhn de Garavito and White 2002; White et al 2004, among others) I predict that adult learners of Spanish have the appropriate representation of number a...

Linguistics in Canada is a vibrant, flourishing field. In the Canadian research context, the social relevance of the formal study of languages and linguistics is well-understood. The Canadian Linguistics Association and the Canadian Journal of Linguistics have a strong tradition of linking the theoretical studies of language with the native languag...

Introduction to the special issue on Hispanic linguistics in Canada - Volume 55 Issue 2 - Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, David Heap, Ana T. Pérez-Leroux

There has been a growing interest in the examination of the steady state of simultaneous bilinguals. An understanding of what leads to the possible weaknesses in the grammar of early bilinguals can contribute to our understanding of the possible causes of the apparent characteristic ‘failures’ in second language acquisition (Montrul 2008). Spanish...

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined knowledge of the properties of the two passives in the L2 Spanish grammar of L1 speakers of English and German. The Full Transfer Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse 1994) predicts that learners should be able to acquire the relevant properties, but German speakers may have an advantage in noticin...

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined knowledge of eventive and stative passives in the L2 Spanish grammar of L1 speakers of English. Although the two types of passive exist in English, the difference between them is not signaled in any specific way. In Spanish, in contrast, the distinction is marked by the choice of copula: ser is...

This volume presents selected papers from the 36th LSRL conference held at Rutgers University in 2006. It contains twenty-two articles of current approaches to the study of Romance linguistics. Well-known researchers present their findings in areas such as of syntax and semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics. The volume contains...

Recent proposals argue that interface areas such as syntax/semantics and syntax/pragmatics are particularly difficult for adult learners, in comparison to purely syntactic phenomena (Sorace 2003, 2004). In contrast, other research shows that L2 learners are able to acquire target representations even when the interpretation is not readily available...

This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first and second language acquisition in terms of maturatio...

In this volume, second language (L2) acquisition researchers and creolists engage in a dialogue, focusing on processes at work in L2 acquisition and creole genesis. The volume opens with an overview of the relationship between L2 acquisition and pidgins/creoles (Siegel). The first group of papers addresses current language contact at a societal or...

There are methodological difficulties in investigating second language (L2) learners' knowledge of reflexive binding, particularly in the case of potentially ambiguous sentences where the learner or native speaker may have a preference for one interpretation over the other. In this paper, we compare two truth-value judgment tasks, one involving sto...

In this paper, we argue in favour of the NO IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS, whereby L2 functional categories, features and feature values are attainable, and against the NO PARAMETER RESETTING HYPOTHESIS, according to which L2 learners are restricted to L1 categories and features, as well as against the LOCAL IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS, which claims that the int...

Résumé Selon la hiérarchie des rôles thématiques (Grimshaw 1990, Jackendoff 1990), le sujet d’expérience doit toujours occuper une position plus haute que celle du thème dans la structure de base. En espagnol, les verbes psychologiques comme gustar ‘ plaire’ ont attiré l’attention des linguistes puisqu’ils semblent violer cette hiérarchie (Parodi-L...

Current research on the nature of interlanguage (IL) representation focuses on properties of functional categories (Det, Comp, Infl, etc.), investigating the extent to which IL grammars diverge from the second language (L2). There are a number of claims that IL grammars are in some sense defective in the functional domain. Included in this category...

This thesis studies the problem of language learnability in relation to two different but related sets of structures in Spanish, both involving multifunctional clitic pronouns. The first of these is the reflexive clitic se which is used in impersonal and inchoative constructions. The second is the dative clitic le which appears in certain clitic do...

It is a well known fact that in the Romance languages complements in the indicative allow coreference between the subject of the main clause and the embedded subject while subjunctive complements do not. This can be explained if we assume that coreference in subjunctive clauses would be in violation of Principle B of Binding. Furthermore, it has be...