The DP, a vulnerable domain?

Recent studies have shown that the acquisition of determiners, and particularly articles, appears unproblematic for children whose target language is French. Examining the acquisition of C-related phenomena in Swedish and German, Platzack (2001) argues that the CP represents a vulnerable domain, showing that grammatical operations related to the CP, unlike operations independent of this domain, are acquired comparatively late and that associated elements tend to be omitted frequently. According to the Configurational Hypothesis (Giorgi and Longobardi 1991) the structure of DP parallels clause structure. As a consequence, the DP could be expected to constitute a vulnerable domain as well. In the present contribution I will analyze longitudinal data from three children acquiring French: a monolingual and two German-French bilingual children, one of them unbalanced with French as her weaker language. It will be shown that at least in French the DP appears to be an invulnerable domain. I will discuss this finding from a cross-linguistic perspective, arguing that frequency of determiners and consistency in their syntactic distribution facilitates and thus accelerates the acquisition process.

Published online: 17 July 2003
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsm.1.02kup