Italian - Friulian children: an investigation into their bilingualism

The present thesis investigates the bilingualism involving Italian majority language and Friulian minority language. Preschool children aged 4 to 6 years old from the town of Gemona del Friuli in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region were tested through a picture supported elicited production experiment designed to investigate relative clauses acquisition (cf. COST Action 33, Friedmann et al. in prep.). Two research questions were addressed: the first concerned the acquisition of relative clauses, in order to verify whether the Italian-Friulian children productions would be comparable with the related cross-linguistic literature; the second question concerned the type of bilingualism found, in order to provide a characterization of its peculiarities: the results were then analysed also with respect to specific bilingual factors as cross-linguistic influence, language dominance and input role. As far as the first research question is concerned, the data presented in this thesis confirm that Italian-Friulian children’s performance is in line with cross-linguistic results in all conditions, namely for SRCs, ORCs, and PPRCs. Specifically, in line with the predictions made following the Relativized Minimality approach (Rizzi 1990, 2004; Friedmann et al. 2009), results support both the subject-object asymmetry and the ORCs and PPRCs performance similarity. Moreover, through a further investigation of PPRCs, an effect of the type of prepositions was found: in the case of PPRCs with lexical prepositions children produced more target-like structures than with PPRCs with functional prepositions. However, it should be added that PPRCs are still scarcely investigated and further research would be needed to better understand the issue. Turning to the second research question, results were analysed comparing the Italian and the Friulian experimental session, also with respect to specific bilingual factors such as cross-linguistic influence, language dominance and input role (Mioni 1979; Meisel 2004; Gorsjean 2011; Rowe and Grohmann 2013). Having considered that the children’s production was essentially in Italian regardless of the language of elicitation being Friulian or Italian, and the ameliorating role played by Italian in influencing the children’s results, it can be said that the Italian-Friulian bilingualism is unbalanced with Italian being the strongly dominant language and Friulian being the weak one. Nonetheless, even if Italian is certainly the dominant language, it should be noted that specific influences of Friulian on Italian were indeed present in the children’s production, regardless of the children being described by their parents as receiving or not receiving a minimum Friulian input. This suggests that even if it is not clear to which extent, still Friulian is alive and productive in those contexts in which the children grow.