ON A STUDY OF BILINGUAL ACQUISITION

Alvino E. Fantini, in his book Language Acquisition of a Bilingual Child: A Sociolin guistic Perspective, describes and discusses aspects of the course of language acquisition in his Spanish/English-speaking son Mario up to the age of ten. (Italian is also involved, but not significantly.) Condemning other studies for their narrow focus on specific subtopics or for their preoccupation with linguistic analysis and failure to take a more comprehensive Hymesian view, which would include sociolinguistic analysis, F sets out to do a more comprehensive analysis of a single case of bilingual acquisition. In the present article, I first give a brief overview of F's work and then discuss in more detail some of the issues discussed by F. The work is set forth in six chapters which focus on various methodological and analytic issues of this case study. Chapter I introduces the in general terms, highlighting the history of such studies and the need for a sociolinguistic perspective on bilingual acquisition. Given this, objectives and methods (essentially, keeping a regular and detailed diary of M's language behavior/development) of the present are outlined. Particularly noteworthy is F's claim that his major objective is to deal . . primarily with developmental sociolin guistic aspects of the [bilingual] learning process, leaving detailed linguistic analysis to future study (p. 5). The efficacy of such an agenda is discussed below. Chapter 2 attempts in more detail to set the project in historical perspective. It contains some interesting discussion of work on developmental bilingualism, claiming that ... most fail to explore the interrelationships of speech and the child's environments (p. 12), hence a gap in the research and the sociolinguistic focus of F's work. F's ensuing discussion of the nature of bilingualism at least reveals the illusive and difficult nature of the subject, which prima facie may seem simple to some. Finally, it is here that F presents what may be termed a Hymesian rationale for his sociolinguistic emphasis. Quoting Hymes to the effect that the analysis of human language is incomplete if linguistic structural analysis is not com plemented by analysis of the social features which impact upon the use of particular linguistic features, F states that ... there is a direct relationship between linguistic and social facts. A sociolinguistic approach attempts to delineate both the social structure and linguistic structure inherent in the utterance, and to correlate the two (pp. 17-18). Accept ing the discovery of such correlations as a central problem of sociolinguistics, logically prior to the discovery of such correlations is an explicit linguistic theory positing significant linguistic elements and an independent theory of significant social elements. Thus, F's earlier claim that he is concerned with sociolinguistic development and not with detailed linguistic analysis falls somewhat short of that problem as he and others have laid it out. The conse quences are discussed further below. Chapter 3 contains an interesting and reasonably complete sketch of M's parents' linguistic background and of M's exposure to language. A strong point of such a case