Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World

“Bilingualism (and consequences thereof) in the Hispanic and Lusophone world embodies a vast topic that touches upon many subfields of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and so much more. It is particularly interesting to examine bilingualism involving Spanish and Portuguese because in their contemporary diasporas the languages have juxtaposing statuses (e.g. compare the prestige of Spanish in Spain with it in the United States), making the bringing together of studies involving these languages from as many different contexts all the more revealing for larger questions of theoretical significance. The studies in this volume touch on a significant array of potential topics, including issues pertinent to language contact studies, sociolinguistics, formal acquisition and processing to name just a few. The volume is a wonderful collection of individual studies that come together to underscore the importance of cross-disciplinary work. It highlights how studies on bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world are and will more and more be drawing on expertise and insights from various traditionally non-intersecting sub disciplines to address complex questions”

“Under the umbrella of the bilingual situations that emerge in several Spanish and Portuguese speaking regions, this volume brings together a compact, well worked-on and round collection of research works on the field of bilingual language acquisition. The studies cover a wide variety of linguistic topics, language-contact phenomena, research methodologies, bilingual speakers’ profiles and language pairs, and they all come together in a final chapter that points to the interdisciplinary, comparative and rich outcomes of the field. It is the first of a fruitful (and much hoped for) collection of studies from the BHL international conference series, a must-have for bilingual acquisition researchers.”

“This selection of papers from the first international conference on Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world (BHL) is an excellent overview of bilingualism in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities in both the Americas and Europe. It brings together an inspiring set of studies that include a wide array of combinations of Spanish and Portuguese with Indo-European and Latin American indigenous languages. Using diverse methodologies to address both production and comprehension and basing their discussion on experimental and bilingual databases, these essays discuss phonological, morphological, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive issues. This rich discussion also addresses issues that are central to bilingualism such as code-switching, the majority and minority status of the various pairs of languages as well as simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. In sum, this volume should be on the shelf of all those interested in the study of bilingualism in general and in the study of bilingualism in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world in particular.”

“ Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World is a welcome contribution to the field, as it provides a rich compendium of studies from a linguistic perspective on a wide variety of bilingual language pairings involving Spanish and Portuguese. This includes work on Basque-Spanish, Spanish-K'ichee', Spanish-Dutch, Portuguese-English, Ixcatec-Spanish, and Spanish-English. The variety of theoretical models and bilingual (and trilingual) types examined makes this volume a fertile source of new information on both some familiar and some less-studied and typologically distinct pairings. Issues concerning evidence for universals of linguistic structure and for the presence or absence of crosslinguistic transfer run through these works on linguistic phenomena and processes as diverse as aspect, mood, relative clauses, compounding, prosody, spatial language, and code-switching, and in bilingual types as diverse as simultaneous bilinguals, heritage speakers, L2 learners, and L3 learners.”

“The volume does a superb job of bringing together areas of study of bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese speaking regions that have historically remained intellectually distant. Combinations of knowledge from these diverse fields provide insights critical to our understanding of bilingualism as a scientific area of study, and allows for the formulation of forward inferences about the linguistic and cognitive abilities of bilingual speakers.”

“The editors gathered an updated and diversified view of research on bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds that includes top-notch studies of bilingual and acquisitional varieties from different theoretical orientations in multiple language settings. Written both by experienced and promising up and coming scholars, what unifies these studies is the rigor of each analysis that, together, provide a comprehensive view of the social and cognitive processes involved in bilingual production among speakers whose repertoire includes either Spanish or Portuguese.”

“The dynamic and energy-exuberant intellectual atmosphere of the first BHL conference that preceded the publication of this book was a kind of epiphany of the novel ideas that were to appear in its collection of articles. As distinguished linguist Pieter Muysken remarks in the title of his contribution, “The global and the local: Making comparisons possible,” the essence of the variety of linguistic topics dealt by the authors allows a rigorous treatment of the study of bilingualism, especially that of Spanish and Portuguese, but it also includes Spanish and English as well as Spanish and Basque, albeit not omitting the influence of the linguistic contact with Amerindian languages. Thus, this book will undoubtedly become obligated reference reading for the students and researchers of these topics.”