Okay well thank you very much for this very kind introduction and I'll start
without much ado. I also want to thank the organizers for inviting me to
present this plenary. I was not given a topic so I could choose it myself and
but I assume they expected me to talk about bilingualism in some sort.
Thanks for the confirmation and I thought I was trying to find a topic which
would also fit in with the general topic of this conference and I resist
the temptation of summarizing my own work over the last years. Instead I want
to raise a few issues which since I assume that most of you are not working
the language acquisition but you are members of the Deutsche Gesellschaft
Firsbach-Wissenschaft so I assume you are interested in linguistic theory. So in a
certain sense my my talk is an appeal for closer cooperation between
acquisition research and theoretical linguistics. Now maybe I should start the
oh my god okay so there I will start talking about briefly about this
cooperation between theoretical and developmental linguistics and this may
not seem as very original but it is actually I think first of all it doesn't
have such a long history as you may perhaps think and secondly I think the
cooperation is frequently sort of just paying lip service. I don't think the
cooperation is really close enough. Part four is the core of the of the
presentation I'll try to go fairly fast through the other parts okay okay so I'm
trying to talk about the different kinds of diversity among bilingual populations
and I think this is indeed a research program which requires the interaction
between theoretical linguistics and and developmental linguistics. It's I'm
having problems with this thing. Oh you're right thank you. Thanks. Okay doesn't
always work there. Come on. Oh my god. I hate this kind of technical problems.
Okay I think this is I've said this three times now I can go on to the next
slide. So I think this as I said this cooperation is maybe not so well
established as we may think. Now it presupposes of course the cognitive
turn turn I'm not talking about the so-called cognitive grammar but you
know about all grammars which take a cognitive approach and in I said here
previous grammars but I realized that this this kind of research program is
still alive and but I think it's only if you are interested in the cognitive
basis of language that you can talk about cognitive procedures like learning
okay so this is where it comes in. It's not that there has not been any kind of
research of course although language acquisition research was mainly done by
psychologists for a long time and of course we need the cooperation with our
colleagues from from psychology and I want at least to mention William Stern
and Clara Stern who lived right up here at Hallerblatz until they had to leave
Germany because of the Nazi movement and this is a book which is still worth
reading but to give you an idea that that how that language acquisition was
really not a considerative part of linguistic theory I gave you this quote
from a 1979 introduction to language acquisition and you can see that that
people thought still at the time that it was sort of strange to talk about what
little little kids produce you know and even going back further I think in
research the serious research is systematic in research on the acquisition
of grammatical competence started in the 60s in the early 60s and I went back to
a book which I'd read a long time ago by Smith and Miller 66 and I found it
interesting that even then I think this may have been one of the four if not the
first conference trying to bring together linguists and acquisition
researchers again most of those working on acquisition were psychologists at the
time even then and even they still had felt the necessity to explain why one
would deal with something strange or cute or whatever like the
pronunciation the utterances by small children and the important part is
perhaps at the bottom line that is the idea that early speech is not just sort
of an abbreviated and distorted form of what the adults do but there is a system
of its own and this is something we had to discover so even then David McNeil
who by the way invented this term developmental psycholinguistics at this
point you know this is 66 this is not that long ago during the lifetime of
some of us at least and so the idea is that you have to develop a theory where
the two cooperate okay so I think this is now nowadays it's this research
program is well established and linguistic theory has always had a very
strong influence on acquisition and another another sentence here on the
slide which I thought was just the obvious and I always hesitate to mention
them but I've learned that nothing can be obvious enough not to be repeated
again and I've learned over the last days that is apparently still
controversial namely I think linguists should not write
grammars which are not learnable okay I'll leave it there otherwise I will
never get through my talk but importantly language acquisition as you
know perhaps known as you've heard I've come my background is in generative
linguistics but I'm not always happy with with what my fellow generative is
too and I think language acquisition is not just a testing ground for last
week's new invention in theoretical linguistics it should always also go the
other way around again this seems may seem obvious or trivial but I don't see
it I cannot I've been thinking and I can't think of one major insight in
theoretical linguistics which is based on acquisition theory that people
actually said maybe we should change and make a modification of our hypothesis
because acquisition shows it doesn't work that way anyway so I don't want to
whine and complain I just want to say we we need closer cooperation okay so
what about in bilingual settings okay so there is of course diversity by
definition in bilingual settings and much one of the core things I want to
talk talk about today is that we have to look closer not every bit of very of
variation is an indication of diversity or divergent development so
I've listed a number here of possible possible effects and I will I'm trying to
cover a very broad range of topics so I have to be rather superficial and I
cannot always justify what I'm saying but you can ask you can attack me on
that during the discussion period so I think what summarizing in on one slide
but what bilingual acquisition research has has done over the last 30 years or
so is that we I don't I think we know that that the human language making
capacity is really an endowment for for a multilingualism in other words if
you are raised in one language you just miss an opportunity because you were
raised in an impoverished context and there are no all embracing effects of
bilingualism so we have to to look more closely and this is also where the
cooperation with with theoretical linguistics becomes important is that we
have to look at which aspects of language of I mean I'm talking language
but I mean grammar you're now especially more for syntax is which parts are
vulnerable which are resistant to change this also has also been mentioned
before so I I think we will find that most of the very of the diversity is
really a variation in use and what which is of course perfectly a reasonable
topic of research but my interest especially today but also in general is
more to see how does the theoretical competence change so my focus will be on
so-called core properties of grammar I know that this is not that this is a
potentially a topic not not everybody will agree on but I think intuitively
at least we we know what we are talking about you know I mean things like subject
verb agreement where second placement in German and other Germanic languages the
OOV order and similar things so this this is really sort of these core
properties my question is under which conditions bilingual settings will these
change it will be the affected by perhaps by the bilingual situation or
whatever so everything you wanted to know about bilingual acquisition in five
minutes I think it bilingual acquisition is indeed a window on on the mechanisms
of development and because we are looking at at several languages and so
we have a better opportunity to to see the role of language in language change
or development and since major these major changes in in the core properties
do not happen or unlikely to happen over the lifespan of an individual it it makes
sense to look at children to see how how they acquire their language and
whether grammatical properties change in transmission from one generation to the
next and I think studying bilinguals can be very helpful again it's tempting to
go into the history of the field I will again try to resist the temptation but
I will at least have to mention a julian who wrote the first comprehensive
book on the acquisition of two simultaneous acquisition of two languages
and julian was really a lawyer who then also but he was he was born in Vienna
which is just south of Lyon for those of you interested in wine it's just where
the northern Rome Appalachian starts and and it's also the area where the the
Occitan area starts okay and so he later wrote he really became famous he
studied also language after law and he became famous really for his camera
historic of the Occitan language published in Montpellier and it really
became famous for that and he in he was married to a German woman and so his
his son was raised in French and German simultaneously and he invented or
propagated the famous in person in long the principle that is when you raise
your children in a bilingual family and where father and mother speak different
languages so they should use their respective languages with a child is it
was suggested by his friend a grandma but he made it popular and by the way he
went to Geneva in 1914 and was one of the proofreaders for the cool the
linguistic general okay so much for that again so not much happened from the
perspective of what I'm talking about that is development of grammatical
competence in in two languages and not all that much happened over the in the
60 years afterwards with the exception of course of Pavlovitch and Leopold and
another quote from Kenji Hakuta who in an interview with Leopold they they
complained that people were not interested in in in bilingual acquisition in 1989
this is closer many of you may have been born by then and but then all of a
sudden there was this explosion in this and the how I wrote now you can't even
read everything anymore which is published on this okay so the main topic
at the beginning let's say in the first 20 years if we talk about last 40 years
so in the first half was differentiation monolinguals seem to be
worried by that they think they seem to think it must be a problem for the child
to keep those two languages apart okay to make a very long story short and a
lot of research which happened in the 80s and 90s is it's not a problem you
know and you don't have to coach the children you don't have to have special
training you just talk to them in meaningful interactions and the children
will acquire the two languages and or at least are able to acquire the two
languages I don't want to go into this now in detail for reasons of time but
you have to understand that the at the beginning of this research the warrior
was just that you know how can children possibly manage okay to to keep these
things apart and there were theories in textbooks until the 90s which said they
necessarily have to go through a phase of fusion and so forth which is not true
okay so they are able to do this in fact this is such a solid finding I think I
mean those of you who are do work on this in this field make contradict me
but I I dared saying that this is unanimous now that there's early
differentiation is possible doesn't mean that it always has to work out all the
time but it's it's possible and without much effort and unanimous statements
like this aren't that frequent in the humanities as far as I can see so it's
to such an extent that we can now turn around I'll have a slight later on this
and ask how is it possible that they do not separate okay because it seems to be
so easy and if we think about it but I will not go into this now as you all
know and especially if you work on registers and so forth monolinguals are
also polylectal and and so they also have to separate them and they are able
to keep their registers apart and their dialects apart and they don't mix them
in different situations so modern bilingualism is really not it's not such
a strange thing after all so this is just a few examples I go very fast over
the first slides so for example for a verb second you know when you want to
find out about the differentiation thing the problem is you're talking about
children around age two when they start using multi-words utter utterances and
so forth and within the European languages they are very much the same
so in the child language okay so it's difficult to find examples but since
children use adverbs very often the diactic elements the verb second effect
you can find out very early and as you can see the same children use in bold
is the finite verb you know it's in French in third position and in German
in second position and it's virtually without any error and we've been looking
also on because the in the European language is so similar we've been
looking at Basque Spanish children in the longitudinal study also and same
thing no problem you know Basque is an SOV language and you have sentences like
aita etienda or banya or it deco soon you see the verb is always in the final
position and when they speak Spanish is in the second position okay so much for
that so there's a lot of evidence for this and so we conclude that in
simultaneous acquisition at least this differentiation is actually acquired
without much problem and so the the bilingual children acquire two
competences simultaneously I know this everybody quotes from my friend and
colleague software called John bilingual is not too monolinguals in one I don't
like this this quote at all I get anxious every time I hear it because it's
either trivial of course bilingual is speaks two languages so just by this
fact is not just like a monolingual but when we talk about grammatical
differentiation the bilingual is two monolinguals period okay I just wanted
to say that so by but the my main the my main point in what follows is what we
can conclude from this it's a bit fast conclusion here for reasons of time but
I'm willing to defend it is is that bilingualism by itself need not be a
reason for problems of so not for change of grammatical change yeah I think I've
said this before and okay so so the right of the question is you know what
will exceed if if the by if we are born with this capacity of acquiring two or
more languages simultaneously there must be situations where it doesn't work out
okay and for some interesting reason this is what people seem to be most
interested in over the last 20 20 years but my conclusion so far is
sometimes two is better than one okay okay let's go to the next part and this
is the the core part of my presentation this this is an important slide can
someone tell me how I can have this is a non-exhaustive list of possible of
bilingual varieties okay so it's L1 mini monolingual acquisition to L1
simultaneous bilingual simultaneous first language acquisition WL is the
the weaker language heritage language child second language adult second
language and so forth third language foreign language that you could add a
few more okay and those in bold are the ones I will talk about since there's
already too much so I couldn't add more so why how do they differ externally
we're looking at the linguistics part a little later so more there's more than
one language that is true for all but the first one and so forth reduced
exposure and age of onset of acquisition so these are the things I will be talking
about there are more factors influencing like apparently one cannot be explicit
enough when when in a talk or in the paper you you you study one factor and
then people tell you yet but this is not everything I know but it's I recently
had my paper published which took me very long to get published because there
wasn't a reviewer who told it was about age of onset of acquisition which I said
on the first page but one of the reviewers in three revisions insisted
but exposures input is also important I know but it's not my paper so today I
will talk about these things I'm not excluding the rest I'm just focusing on
on these things okay so my question basically is for today why do we call
these varieties by different names why do we call it second language first
language third language and heritage language and so forth if we are
reasonable researchers we call them by different names because they are
different right but maybe they are not I mean that's the question okay so this
is the question I want to pursue a little bit further today I have a
manuscript but I have no idea where okay so I'm trying to avoid theoretical
discussions I will not discuss the terminology of incomplete acquisition I
will not discuss whether there is UG access or not so I'm I'm I'm still
optimistic that is I'm trying to say if we just look at the facts could we
perhaps agree that the fact is a fact and if we do and what does it mean so
this is sort of my approach obviously I'm always biased in my interests and
so forth by my theoretical background but this is what I'm trying to say so why
would you call things why call it would you call something first and second
language acquisition okay there's one is learn first the other second but if they
were all the same we could use one term we don't have to distinguish them
terminologically so let's look for differences okay so how do they differ
now linguistically they could differ in the in that certain constructions only
appear in one variety not and not in the other one okay so for instance in in
the acquisition of German you find that second language learners frequently put
non-finite verbs in second position this is something a child never does you
know monolingual or bilingual child acquiring so just as an illustration so
this is one kind of linguistic property which appears in one of these and not in
the other and that would justify the difference between first and second
language acquisition not this one phenomenon of course you have to go
through through more then the development sequences okay so one of
I'll come back to all four in this in a second the one of the major insights of
acquisition research and then sloven one said perhaps the only major insight and
certainly very important is by Roger Brown and others that children acquiring
a language go through certain stages meaning that certain not everything but
certain parts of grammar are acquired in the same order by all children probably
even universally across language languages okay and this is an important
fact and then you can say okay if first language acquisition is defined by a
particular developmental sequence do we find the same in these other types okay
the third is the clustering of superficially unrelated phenomena now
here comes in the parameter notion a little bit but even if you don't believe
in parameter theory the fact is or certainly not in the traditional one the
fact is that if you if children acquire certain certain grammar and not just
superficial phenomena things will appear I'll have an example in just just a
minute and fourth is something I always insist on is the developmental pattern
that you have in in first language acquisition in some domains abrupt
changes that is over time meaning what does it mean abrupt we can argue about
that but you you find that at one point the children have zero uses of a
phenomenon and two months later at 90 above 90 percent that's what I call
abrupt okay I have a slide after my thank-you slide if if you want to look
at it later okay so let me briefly and fast go through these things in I quote
myself here because I had almost forgotten about this but in a 91 paper
you know I had this list of phenomena which exists in l1 but not in l2
let me just enter parent as I should have mentioned this perhaps earlier from what I
said earlier I I conclude does mono-lingual and bilingual acquisition I said simultaneous
bilinguals are the same so on this list of different varieties I already take it for
granted now that first monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition are not different
okay so now I'm looking at monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition in contrast
with second language acquisition and to give the punchline wild away I mean it's probably not much
of a surprise is that these will be different okay so they differ in the in in in the specific
construction types they differ in developmental sequences that's what I just said in you know
in first language acquisition you have these sequences interestingly enough you also have
such invariant sequences in second language acquisition so in other words untutored second
language acquisition is guided by something probably our language capacity but the two
are not identical okay so thirdly the clustering effect for reasons of time I will just skip it
I mean not skip but but not go into details but if you look at French and
English for example you see that since the verb moves in French but not over certain things like
like adverbs and so forth but not in English you have these differences now in traditional
grammars you you find them treated separately but it's just one phenomenon the phenomenon is that
the verb moves right and and but you get four different surfaces more importantly second
language learners learn these separately in other words they somehow have a different grammar I
won't go into this but obviously they don't use the same kind of verb movement as in the
interest language acquisition and the other is the abrupt change I already told you what I mean by
this you know that is in first language acquisition some phenomena like for instance with once
children in German for instance use finiteness you know they also move the verb into second position
and and they use subjects and all this comes in within two months you know and I think two months
is pretty good for I'm pretty fast and you can see in second language learners over two years
they don't get it
conclusion so there are differences here okay so we have been looking at three now monolingual
first language acquisition uh bilingual first language acquisition and second language acquisition
and for reasons of time I'm not going into this separately but I can tell you that child second
language acquisition is very much like adult second language acquisition there are some
similarities where with first still but in other words uh so far this terminological choice is
justified because uh we have I'm repeating here but uh maybe it's useful um the the the term
monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition is justified because its first
language acquisition and they differ only in the case in that there are several languages
and second language acquisition is justified because it differs from the other two and child
second language acquisition is justified because its second language acquisition that is differs
from the other first, but there are certain things in which it also differs from the adults.
So now there are things which are more problematic.
So I'm still looking in which context will they not get it?
Where will this fail?
So early age of onset of acquisition is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
the development.
And this is an interesting question, I think, because it says, you know, or the question
is let's say, you know, when will children who are exposed to the first language from
birth, when will they fail to acquire native competence?
So there are two cases which have been discussed in the literature, and this is what the rest
of my talk, namely the so-called weaker languages and the heritage languages.
And let's look at four types of empirical evidence.
I've already seen a sign, so I have to speed up a little bit.
I want to say, so that it's easier for you to follow what I'm doing here, I want to say
that the first three are not sufficient to distinguish different types, okay?
I'm not saying that you shouldn't study this.
This is interesting variation, but for my research question, will this lead to divergent
developments?
The answer will be no.
Only the fourth one will tell you something.
So to make the story short, and I'm quoting critically papers which I think are very good.
It's not at persona criticism.
On the contrary, I think these are very interesting papers, but the hypothesis there was that
the weak language is acquired like a second language.
And I say no, because why not?
One example is the verb second position.
And if you look at this down here, this is the name of the child over time, and this
is the verb second placement, and this is the incriminator.
This is the one why they said they are second language learners.
Now initially, the child gets it right.
And then there's a period when it's sometimes right and sometimes not right.
And then there's a period when it's correct again.
So unless you want to say the child acquired it, lost it, acquired it, lost it, something
which nobody has ever seen happening in language acquisition, so if you don't want to come
up with such a strange hypothesis, then you have to say, well, they have acquired the
verb second, but they don't always use it.
So the question now is, a question which I will not pursue, is I think the interesting
question is why don't they use it all the time, although they have it?
But you cannot say they haven't acquired it.
That's my argument.
And similar argument, whenever people say, oh, but there is a lot of variation in bilinguals,
they always quote Susanna Dubke and Yip and Matthews.
I wonder if this is really, I'm not saying that the data is wrong or anything, okay?
The question is, why are they so different from the rest of the things which we've seen,
a question which I cannot answer?
But my point is, it's not sufficient to quote some weird constructions, some non-canonical,
as some of you will call it, and say, see, they are different.
As long as you cannot explain the non-canonical thing.
Now, this construction, for instance, I have just one example from Dubke, this is neither
English nor German.
So what is it?
If you want to construct an argument, you have to show what kind of grammar you are
attributing to this person, a grammar which would generate this construction like this.
I have no idea what this grammar would look like.
My idea would be, it's a performance error again, okay?
Similar arguments, so that's why I can go.
The other is from Yip and Matthew, they look at Cantonese English child, and Cantonese
has WH and C2, and English has WH at the beginning, and they claim, this child, what I appreciate
is at least they tell us what they mean by transfer, mainly they explicitly say transfer
means that something from language A, from grammar, excuse me, from grammar A is incorporated
into grammar B. In many papers you read, you don't even know when people talk about transfer,
are they talking about activation of knowledge in performance?
No, they are saying the grammar, so they say, this child has a feature of the Mandarin grammar
namely WH and C2, whatever the grammar looks like, incorporated into English, except that
just with the Schluter example, this child, they don't quantify, so they just give examples,
okay? So the first child, the first construction, the first WH construction, which the child
which they quote is correct, that is with movement, and then there are some without
movement and then there is movement again. So the same argument, you can't argue that
this is a Cantonese grammar in English if the child does it first correctly as required
by the English target, and later again. It must be an activation problem.
So I think these, what I'm trying to say also is, you know, it's not enough to look
at non-canonical constructions or error frequency, you have to look at the developmental pattern.
And when you see that it's first there, then it's sometimes there, then it's not there,
then the argument that it's a different grammar won't hold. That's basically my argument.
So heritage language learners, are they different? To give the answer right away because I'm
getting into time trouble is so that you know where I want to get at, the answer is no.
I think it's not a different type of acquisition. It's a different population from sociolinguistic
and educational perspective. But from the perspective of acquisition, you have bilinguals,
simultaneous, successive bilinguals and so forth. And they behave just like those I mentioned
before. There is no acquisition population which is justly called, should justly be called
heritage language learners. The argument is they resemble both acquisition types. Then
my answer is just what I said to the other ones now. Show us when I'm in the developmental
patterns. Is it really there consistently? Then it's a grammatical phenomenon. If it
shows up occasionally, it disappears again. It is not. There is no set of, this was one
of my arguments, there's no set of particular constructions which only happen in this population.
So how do they differ? Not at all. And I give you this quote here to give you this quote
simultaneous bilingual children are quote simply high proficiency heritage language
learners. Okay. I'm fine with that. But that is just swapping labels. Now we're calling
everybody heritage language learners and the non-successful ones are the real ones and
the other one are high proficient or so. I refuse to swap labels. I call everybody bilinguals
as I used to do before. And then we can say, okay, tell us what is specific about the heritage
language learners. The argument is all through the literature on heritage language learners
is they have incomplete acquisition or partial, not the full native grammar. Of course this
can happen. And this is why I think heritage language studies can make a very important
contribution, namely if they can show us when it will happen. And this has not been done
yet. They, in the literature you get, you are told it's the reduced exposure. Now this
is crucial now. This because these studies are not the same. They are the same. They
are the ones which could tell us what, where the threshold is. What does reduced mean?
Now we as linguists, we are reluctant to give a precise figure, you know, to save so many
hours per day or something like that. But it's a practical question which is important.
As you've heard, I'm doing a lot of counseling for parents. And 20 years ago the usual question
was, you know, I'm French, my wife is German and so forth. Nowadays the typical thing is,
you know, I'm Russian, my wife is Turkish and we live in Berlin. So you have at least
three languages. Is this possible? Sometimes and then there's a Kurdish grandmother and
so forth you have easily four. So people want to know what is the minimum amount of exposure.
And we can't answer this. We cannot tell them. You know, we have a vague idea which I can't
pursue because I have to stop soon. But roughly speaking if you allow me to give a ballpark
figure is we know that 30% of what is normal, whatever normal means, that 30% does work.
Not necessarily, but it does work. When it drops below that, it's getting difficult.
So this is an important question. And this is where heritage language speakers could
reveal us. But only if heritage language studies will not only, I mean, the researchers among
you will not only study their own students or someone, you know, and ask 20 years ago
how much exposure did you have, this is useless. You know, we need the same standards as in
acquisition otherwise. We need studies like, there are only two or three to my knowledge,
you know, the one by Carmen Silva Corvallan who studied her grandchildren, you know, who
had an exposure of under 30% and they speak more or less Spanish, okay? So this is the
limit. So this is where we have to look, you know, and you have to really study it in case
studies and quantify seriously asking parents or teachers or so 30 years later or 20 years
later won't do, I'm sorry. Causal factors, I'll have to do this very fast, but that's
easy to do. There are these three. There is, of course, no mono console explanation. I'm
focusing on these three and there are more. Bilingualism in itself is not a reason for
failure. Age of onset is, as we've seen in the second language acquisition, and it happens
much earlier than most of us thought. I mean, we can find differences between first and
second language learners at age of onset three and a half in production. It's probably even
earlier, okay? These are subtle at the beginning. It doesn't mean that you can't learn a second
language anymore. You can learn it when you're 70, but it will be different and different
unfortunately means worse, okay? And exposure is relevant. I don't know why I always read
this quote. Early exposure is not a sufficient condition for successful acquisition. Has
anybody ever said it wasn't? I mean, I would like to see you quote, you know, when people
like me, but not only me, do research on early onset of acquisition, we are saying, oh, I
would say, if you don't start learning the language during the first four years or so,
you are likely not to acquire full competence or native competence. But the reverse doesn't
hold. It doesn't mean that if you start early, you will always succeed. I here in public
admit that no input will lead to no acquisition. So the question is, how much input do we need?
And so of course it is relevant, okay? Okay. Conclusions is, please don't jump to conclusions.
That is, when you see variation and you see multilingualism and you say, okay, this explains
variation or change, no, it doesn't. Okay. It may be, no, that's on the next page. On
the next and last page, I have a quote from someone who I admire, but I think this shows
the need for more cooperation, okay? David Lightfoot, who is one of, sorry for those
of you, I don't want to insult those who do diachronic studies, but he is one of the few
historical linguists who knows about language acquisition and yet, yeah, what is this? Yeah,
he has this quote where he says, as an explanation for language acquisition is because there
are several languages in a, there's a kind of creolization. This is total rubbish, okay?
I mean, this is exactly not what we found. When children are exposed from early with
two or three or four languages, they acquire two or three or four languages. They don't
acquire a creol or something. They don't develop a creol. So, Thomas and Kaufman may
be right, may be right when they say dialect or language context is a necessary cause,
but it's definitely not a sufficient cause. And if you say, oh, it's a bilingual situation,
you haven't explained anything. You've just started. You have to say, who does what in
order for a change to happen? Thank you.
So, thank you very much. We have a few.