The acquisition of control in European Portuguese
We offer a new insight on the acquisition of control, by considering data from Portuguese. We explore two main issues: (i) the distinction between obligatory control and non-obligatory control and (ii) choice of controller. Our results show that children distinguish certain obligatory and non-obligatory control contexts: children accepted a sentence-external antecedent in infinitival subjects but not in infinitival complements. Additionally, our study confirms previous results suggesting that subject control in promise-type contexts is delayed. However, it equally shows that there is no absolute bias for object control at early stages. We evaluate predictions made by contemporary accounts of control, namely the movement theory of control (Hornstein, 1999) and the theory of control as Agree (Landau, 2000, and subsequent work).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.On the nature of control: Accounting for EP data
- 3.Previous studies on the acquisition of control and complementation
- 4.Research questions
- 5.The experimental task
- 6.Results
- 7.Discussion
- 8.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
References (45)
References
Agostinho, C. (2014). The acquisition of control in European Portuguese complement clauses (Unpublished MA dissertation). Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.
Barbosa, P., & Raposo, E. (2013). Subordinação argumental infinitiva. In E. Raposo, M. F. Bacelar do Nascimento, M. A. Coelho da Mota, L. Seguro, & A. Mendes (Eds.), Gramática do Português (Vol. II, pp. 1901–1977). Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
Becker, M. (2005). Raising, control and the subset principle. In J. Alderete, C. Han, & A. Kochetov (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 52–60). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Becker, M. (2006). There began to be a learnability puzzle. Linguistic Inquiry, 27(3), 441–456. 

Boland, J. E., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Garnsey, S. M. (1990). Evidence for the immediate use of verb control information in sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 413–432. 

Cairns, H. S., McDaniel, D., Hsu, J. R., & Rapp, M. (1994). A longitudinal study of principles of control and pronominal reference in child English. Language, 70(2), 260–288. 

Chomsky, C. (1969). The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10 (1972 ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Eisenberg, S., & Cairns, H. S. (1994). The development of infinitives from three to five. Journal of Child Language, 21(3), 723–734. 

Farkas, D. (1988). On obligatory control. Linguistics and Philosophy 11(1): 27–58.

Friedmann, N., Belletti, B., & Rizzi, L. (2009). Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua, 119, 67–88. 

Hirsch, C., & Wexler, K. (2007). The late development of raising: What children seem to think about seem
. In W. D. Davies & S. Dubinsky (Eds.), New horizons in the analysis of control and raising (pp. 35–70). Dordrecht: Springer. 

Hirsch, C., Orfitelli, R., & Wexler, K. (2007). When seem means think: The role of the experiencer-phrase in children’s comprehension of Raising. In A. Belikova, L. Meroni, & M. Umeda (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) (pp. 135–146). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Hirsch, C., Orfitelli, R., & Wexler, K. (2008). The acquisition of raising reconsidered. In A. Gavarró & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Hornstein, N. (1999). Movement and control. Linguistic Inquiry, 30(1), 69–96. 

Hsu, J. R., Cairns, H. S. & Fiengo, R. W. (1985). The development of grammars underlying children’s interpretation of complex sentences. Cognition 20, 25–48.

Hsu, J. R., Cairns, H. S., Eisenberg, S., & Schlisselberg, G. (1989). Control and coreference in early child language. Journal of Child Language, 16(3), 599–622. 

Johnson, D. E. (2009). Getting off the GoldVarb standard : Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1): 359–383. 

Kirby, S. (2011). Move over, Control freaks: Syntactic raising as a cognitive default. In N. Danis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (Eds.), BUCLD 35 Online proceedings supplement. Retrieved from <[URL]>
Landau, I. (2000). Elements of control. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 

Landau, I. (2001). Control and extraposition: The case of super-equi. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 19(1), 109–152. 

Landau, I. (2004). The scale of finiteness and the calculus of control. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22, 811–877. 

Landau, I. (2006). Severing the distribution of PRO from Case. Syntax, 9(2), 153–170. 

Landau, I. (2013). Control in generative grammar: A research companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Landau, I., & Thornton, R. (2011). Early child control. Lingua, 121(5), 920–942. 

McDaniel, D., & Cairns, H. S. (1990a). The child as informant: Eliciting linguistic judgments from young children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 19(5), 331–344. 

McDaniel, D., & Cairns, H. S. (1990b). The processing and acquisition of control structures by young children. In L. Frazier & J. de Villiers (Eds.), Language processing and language acquisition. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 

McDaniel, D., Cairns, H. S., & Hsu, J. R. (1990/1991). Control principles in the grammars of young children. Language Acquisition, 1(4), 297–335. 

Nunes, J. (1995). The copy theory of movement and the linearization of chains in the minimalist program (Unpublished PhD dissertation). The University of Maryland.
Nunes, J. (2001). Sideward movement. Linguistic Inquiry, 32(2), 303–344. 

Omaki, A., & Lidz, J. (2015). Linking parser development to acquisition of syntactic knowledge. Language Acquisition, 22(2), 158–192. 

Orfitelli, R. (2012a). Argument intervention in the acquisition of A-movement (Unpublished PhD dissertation). The University of California, Los Angeles.
Orfitelli, R. (2012b). ‘Experiencing’ a slight delay: Intervening arguments and the acquisition of subject-to-subject raising. In A. Biller, E. Chung, & A. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (Vol. 2, pp. 374–386). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Polinsky, M. (2013). Raising and control. In M. den Dikken (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of generative syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Raposo, E. (1989). Prepositional infinitival constructions in European Portuguese. In O. Jaeggli & K. J. Safir (Eds.), The null subject parameter (pp. 277–305). Dordrecht: Kluwer. 

Reinhart, T., & Reuland, E. (1993). Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry, 24(4), 657–720.
Rosenbaum, P. S. (1967). The grammar of English predicate complementation (3rd printing, March 1972). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Santos, A. L., Gonçalves, A., & Hyams, N. (2014). Aspects of the acquisition of control and ECM-type verbs in European Portuguese. Proceedings of
GALA 2013
. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Santos, A. L., Gonçalves, A., & Hyams, N. (2015). Aspects of the acquisition of object control and ECM-type verbs in European Portuguese. Language Acquisition. 

Santos, A. L., Généreux, M., Cardoso, A., Agostinho, C., & Abalada, S. (2014). A corpus of European Portuguese child and child-directed speech. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the ninth international Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC'14). Reykjavik, Iceland: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Santos, A. L., Jesus, A., & Abalada, S. (2017). Controlo de objeto com infinitivo (não) flexionado. Paper presented at
XXXIII Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística
. Universidade de Évora, 27–29 September.
Sherman, J. C. (1983). The acquisition of control in complement sentences: The role of structural and lexical factors (Unpublished PhD dissertation). Cornell University.
Sherman, J. C. (1987). Evidence against a minimum distance principle in first language acquisition of anaphora. In B. Lust (Ed.), Studies in the acquisition of anaphora (Vol. 2, pp. 89–101). Dordrecht: Reidel. 

Sherman, J. C., & Lust, B. (1986). Syntactic and lexical constraints on the acquisition of control in complement sentences. In B. Lust (Ed.), Studies in acquisition of anaphora (Vol. I, pp. 279–308). Dordrecht: Reidel. 

Sherman, J. C., & Lust, B. (1993). Children are in control. Cognition, 46, 1–51. 

Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Cadime, Irene, Ana Lúcia Santos, Iolanda Ribeiro & Fernanda Leopoldina Viana
2021.
Parental Reports of Preschoolers' Lexical and Syntactic Development: Validation of the CDI-III for European Portuguese.
Frontiers in Psychology 12

Delgado, João, Ana Raposo & Ana Lúcia Santos
2021.
Assessing Intervention Effects in Sentence Processing: Object Relatives vs. Subject Control.
Frontiers in Psychology 12

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.