The focus of the present paper is on the different acquisitional patterns emerging in the development of a bilingual child's verbal systems. The data comes from a longitudinal study of Carlo, a bilingual English-Italian child, between the ages of 1;10 and 3;2. An analysis of the data reveals a discrepancy in the emergence and development of the verbal system in the two languages. Firstly, from a purely quantitative point of view the number of verbal types and tokens is significantly higher in Italian. Secondly, while in Italian appropriate inflectional morphology and subject-verb agreement appear from the earliest recordings, in English by the end of the period under consideration Carlo's speech is still characterised by a high degree of optionality. Thirdly, in English Carlo seems to be generally more conservative, tending to imitate adult utterances and rely on routines to a higher extent than he does in Italian. Although it is a fact that in both languages formulaic utterances and routines play a fundamental role in the grammar building process, in Italian the range and repertoire of verbal expressions displays a flexiblity that is not found in English.A number of factors are then presented to try and account for the dichotomy observed in the data: morphophonological properties of the two languages; quantity and quality of the input; style of interactions with the adult interlocutors.
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