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Complement Clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and acquisition
Edited by Ana Lúcia Santos and Anabela Gonçalves
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 17] 2018
► pp. 295–320

The acquisition of infinitival complements to causative verbs in Mozambican Portuguese

| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon | Eduardo Mondlane University

This chapter aims at analyzing the acquisition of complements to causative verbs in Mozambican Portuguese (MozP) as L1 by pre-school children. By presenting the results of a completion task (Santos, Gonçalves, & Hyams, 2016), we show that Mozambican children, like Portuguese ones, take propositional complements as complete functional domains, which explains the high occurrence of inflected infinitives. However, MozP presents an innovative pattern in which the causative verb selects for a complement with the structure [DP XP]. We claim that this complement corresponds to a pseudo-relative, a structure which is severely constrained in Portuguese.

Keywords: acquisition, causative verbs, infinitival complements, Mozambican Portuguese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Complements to causative verbs in Portuguese
  • 3.Acquisition of Portuguese causative verbs: Facts and questions
    • 3.1Previous work on European Portuguese
    • 3.2Causative verbs in (the acquisition of) Mozambican Portuguese: Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.17.10gon
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