The focus of this collection of essays is on the acquisition of so called vulnerable and invulnerable grammatical domains in multilingualism. Language acquisition is studied from a comparative perspective, mostly in the framework of generative grammar. Different types of multilingualism are compared, the existence of multiple grammars in L1 acquisition, simultaneous L2 acquisition (balanced and unbalanced bilingualism) and successive L2 acquisition (child and adult L2 acquisition). Evidence from the language pairs French-German, Italian-Swedish, Spanish-English, Spanish-German, Spanish-Basque, Portuguese-Japanese-English, Portuguese-German, English-German, Turkish-German is brought to bear on grammatical issues pertaining to the morphology and syntax of the noun phrase, pronoun use and the null-subject property, clause structure, verb position, non-finite clauses, agreement at the clause level, and on issues like code mixing and language dominance.

Table of contents

Introduction Natascha Müller vii–xiv The DP, a vulnerable domain? Evidence from the acquisition of French Tanja Kupisch 1–39 Child and adult acquisition of word order in the Italian DP Petra Bernardini 41–81 Null Subjects and optional infinitives in Basque Maria-José Ezeizabarrena 83–106 The acquisition of subjects in bilingual children: Pronoun use in Portuguese-German children Marc-Olivier Hinzelin 107–137 Approaches to bilingual acquisition data Ira Gawlitzek-Maiwald 139–159 Factors accounting for code-mixing in an early developing bilingual Margaret Deuchar and Rachel Muntz 161–190 Syllable final consonants in Spanish and German monolingual and bilingual acquisition Conxita Lleó, Imme Kuchenbrandt, Margaret Kehoe and Cristina Trujillo 191–220 Interrogative elements as subordinators in Turkish: Aspects of Turkish-German bilingual children’s language use Annette Herkenrath, Birsel Karakoç and Jochen Rehbein 221–269 Child L2 acquisition: An insider account Mary Aizawa Kato 271–293 The Verb–Object parameter in simultaneous and successive acquisition of bilingualism Anja Möhring and Jürgen Michael Meisel 295–334 Multiple grammars, feature-attraction, pied-piping, and the question: Is AGR inside TP? Tom Roeper 335–360 Name index 361–365 Subject index 367–374