Elizabeth Tobyn Website: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/elizabeth.tobyn-2 Thesis: The Acquisition of Unaccusativity on Evidence from Early and Late Dialect-Italian Bilinguals The University of Manchester

Elizabeth’s project is concerned with ‘nonstandard bilingualism’ (when one speaks both a standard language and a dialect) and the formation of the periphrastic past tense, which in Italian consists 6 of an auxiliary verb (either ‘be’ or ‘have’) and the past participle of the main verb. Split intransitivity manifests by alternating these two auxiliaries (lit. I have walked vs I am gone). Unlike Italian, Palermitano (i.e., the dialect spoken in Palermo) does not display a split system; thus, the past is formed only with ‘have’. During her NWCDTP-funded fieldwork, Elizabeth spent five months in Italy interviewing 100 speakers of Italian and a dialect. Specifically, she investigated the linguistic production of simultaneous bilinguals (individuals who have been bilinguals from birth) and consecutive bilinguals (individuals who started learning a second language later in life). Elizabeth aimed to determine if consecutive bilinguals can acquire a second language, in this case, Italian, to the same extent as simultaneous early bilinguals and if the input of a HAVE-only (in this case, Palermitano) system influences the acquisition of Italian. To determine the latter, Elizabeth also interviewed speakers from Siena. This area has a central dialect which displays the same auxiliation system as standard Italian. Although Elizabeth is still analysing the data, one interesting finding was that HAVE is represented more in the grammar of younger participants; in simple terms, younger generations combine HAVE with unaccusative verbs more than the older participants. Although this remains to be verified, one possible explanation is that irrespective of the dialect or age of acquisition, the Italian language is changing towards an over-generalisation of HAVE.

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