El programa minimalista y el inglés/castellano-euskera de las ikastolas.

Based on recent minimalist work, this thesis attempts to shed new light on the problem of how syntax and morphology interact in the process of language acquisition. In order to do this we examine the verb-subject morphosyntactic distribution displayed in spontaneous oral cross-sectional data elicited from three groups of bilingual (Spanish/Basque) children who acquire English in an institutional setting. The three groups had been learning English for four years and differed in the age at which acquisition started. Despite these characteristics, the interlanguage of our three groups shows strikingly similar patterns with other English L2 longitudinal data, a finding which opens new questions about the age factor. Also, in the three groups, English-like structures co-occur with structures which seem to be specific of English L2 data. This co-occurrence has also been reported (although not explained) in other English L2 case studies in which the L1 (namely French and Spanish) projects the same syntactic structure as Spanish and Basque. All this leads us to propose that in all cases these children project the syntactic structure of the L1s (Spanish and Basque) and adjust English data into it. We also believe that bilingualism could in this case reinforce the transfer of the native structure, since the two L1s have the same syntactic projections