Chapter published in:
Complement Clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and acquisition
Edited by Ana Lúcia Santos and Anabela Gonçalves
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 17] 2018
► pp. 261–294

The acquisition of control in European Portuguese

| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon
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).
Keywords: control, infinitival complements, acquisition of syntax, European Portuguese
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
Published online: 16 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.17.09ago
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(2014) The acquisition of control in European Portuguese complement clauses (Unpublished MA dissertation).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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
(2006) There began to be a learnability puzzle. Linguistic Inquiry, 27(3), 441–456. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, C.
(1969) The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10 (1972 ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, S., & Cairns, H. S.
(1994) The development of infinitives from three to five. Journal of Child Language, 21(3), 723–734. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Farkas, D.
(1988) On obligatory control. Linguistics and Philosophy 11(1): 27–58.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Friedmann, N., Belletti, B., & Rizzi, L.
(2009) Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua, 119, 67–88. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
(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.Google Scholar
Hornstein, N.
(1999) Movement and control. Linguistic Inquiry, 30(1), 69–96. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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 http://​www​.bu​.edu​/bucld​/proceedings​/supplement​/vol35/Google Scholar
Landau, I.
(2000) Elements of control. Dordrecht: Kluwer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2001) Control and extraposition: The case of super-equi. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 19(1), 109–152. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2004) The scale of finiteness and the calculus of control. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22, 811–877. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2006) Severing the distribution of PRO from Case. Syntax, 9(2), 153–170. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2013) Control in generative grammar: A research companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Landau, I., & Thornton, R.
(2011) Early child control. Lingua, 121(5), 920–942. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McDaniel, D., & Cairns, H. S.
(1990a) The child as informant: Eliciting linguistic judgments from young children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 19(5), 331–344. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McDaniel, D., Cairns, H. S., & Hsu, J. R.
(1990/1991) Control principles in the grammars of young children. Language Acquisition, 1(4), 297–335. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nunes, J.
(1995) The copy theory of movement and the linearization of chains in the minimalist program (Unpublished PhD dissertation). The University of Maryland.
(2001) Sideward movement. Linguistic Inquiry, 32(2), 303–344. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Omaki, A., & Lidz, J.
(2015) Linking parser development to acquisition of syntactic knowledge. Language Acquisition, 22(2), 158–192. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Orfitelli, R.
(2012a) Argument intervention in the acquisition of A-movement (Unpublished PhD dissertation). The University of California, Los Angeles.
(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.Google Scholar
Polinsky, M.
(2013) Raising and control. In M. den Dikken (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of generative syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Reinhart, T., & Reuland, E.
(1993) Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry, 24(4), 657–720.Google Scholar
Rosenbaum, P. S.
(1967) The grammar of English predicate complementation (3rd printing, March 1972) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Santos, A. L.
(2009) Minimal answers. Ellipsis, syntax and discourse in the acquisition of European Portuguese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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.
(2015) Aspects of the acquisition of object control and ECM-type verbs in European Portuguese. Language Acquisition. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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).Google Scholar
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.
(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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1993) Children are in control. Cognition, 46, 1–51. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 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 Crossref logo
Delgado, João, Ana Raposo & Ana Lúcia Santos
2021. Assessing Intervention Effects in Sentence Processing: Object Relatives vs. Subject Control. Frontiers in Psychology 12 Crossref logo
Santos, Ana Lúcia
2021.  In L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 65], ► pp. 84 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 march 2022. 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.