Minimal Answers

Ellipsis, syntax and discourse in the acquisition of European Portuguese

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ISBN 9789027253095 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00
 
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ISBN 9789027289766 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00
 
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This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the acquisition of the syntax-discourse interface. It provides evidence that children acquiring European Portuguese have a very early ability to spontaneously produce VP ellipsis as answers to yes-no questions. It is also argued that the distribution of VP ellipsis in European Portuguese (including its co-existence with Null Complement Anaphora) supports the hypothesis that the identification condition on ellipsis is derivable from some innate knowledge of the syntax-discourse interface. Answers to yes-no questions also provide evidence concerning children’s interpretation of questions containing a cleft or the operator ‘only’. The analysis of spontaneous production is complemented by a comprehension experiment, showing that children have two problems in the interpretation of these questions: (i) they do not understand that the cleft and introduce a presupposition and (ii) they start with a default focus assignment strategy and may not access other focus interpretations.
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 48] 2009.  xv, 296 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 20 February 2009
Table of Contents
“This book overall is an impressive and major contribution to the field of language acquisition. It is a model dissertation for students of language acquisition, and sets the stage for further exploration of the syntax/discourse interface in young children’s grammars.”
“Santos is to be commended for the scope of the study presented, from its impeccable methodology that combines spontaneous production with experiments that more directly tap competence, to the insightful analysis, which reflects a keen understanding of all the relevant issues in acquisition theory and most impressively of the theoretical syntactic ones.[...]. We highly recommend this book. It will be a useful resource for graduate students and academics interested in interface acquisition issues, particularly so for those with an interest in the acquisition of Romance languages.”
Cited by (31)

Cited by 31 other publications

Agostinho, Celina, Anna Gavarró & Ana Lúcia Santos
2024. The acquisition of the verbal passive: The role of verb type. Language Acquisition  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Gutiérrez Maté, Miguel
2024. The multilingual repertoire of the Haitian community in Chapecó (SC, Brazil): Patterns of linguistic evolution in a South–South migration context. Open Linguistics 10:1 DOI logo
Nel, Joanine
2023. The comprehension of ellipsis in isiXhosa-speaking Grade 1 learners. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 41:4  pp. 465 ff. DOI logo
Lipták, Anikó
2022. Response particles and verbal identity. Journal of Uralic Linguistics 1:2  pp. 239 ff. DOI logo
Agostinho, Celina & Anna Gavarró Algueró
2021. The acquisition of verbal passives by Portuguese-speaking children. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2017 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 355],  pp. 10 ff. DOI logo
Arregi, Karlos & Asia Pietraszko
2021. The Ups and Downs of Head Displacement. Linguistic Inquiry 52:2  pp. 241 ff. DOI logo
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 DOI logo
D’Ortenzio, Silvia & Francesca Volpato
Hein, Johannes
2021. Verb movement and the lack of verb-doubling VP-topicalization in Germanic. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 24:1  pp. 89 ff. DOI logo
Polinsky, Maria & Gregory Scontras
2020. Understanding heritage languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23:1  pp. 4 ff. DOI logo
Costa, Ana Luísa
2019. A contribution to the implicit/explicit debate on grammar learning: the case of contrast connectors. Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies :24(1)  pp. 45 ff. DOI logo
Agostinho, Celina, Ana Lúcia Santos & Inês Duarte
2018. The acquisition of control in European Portuguese. In Complement Clauses in Portuguese [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 17],  pp. 261 ff. DOI logo
Gonçalves, Anabela & Ana Lúcia Santos
2018. Complement clauses in Portuguese. In Complement Clauses in Portuguese [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 17],  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Landau, Idan
2018. Missing objects in Hebrew: Argument ellipsis, not VP ellipsis. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1 DOI logo
Landau, Idan
2020. On the Nonexistence of Verb-Stranding VP-Ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 51:2  pp. 341 ff. DOI logo
Landau, Idan
2020. Constraining Head-Stranding Ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 51:2  pp. 281 ff. DOI logo
Landau, Idan
2021. Ellipsis with a Coordinated Antecedent: An Alternative to V‐strandingVP‐ellipsis. Studia Linguistica 75:1  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Martins, Ana Maria
Gribanova, Vera
2017. Head movement and ellipsis in the expression of Russian polarity focus. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 35:4  pp. 1079 ff. DOI logo
Gribanova, Vera
2020. Predicate formation and verb-stranding ellipsis in Uzbek. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5:1 DOI logo
Silva, Carla, Irene Cadime, Iolanda Ribeiro, Sandra Santos, Ana Lúcia Santos & Fernanda Leopoldina Viana
2017. Parents’ reports of lexical and grammatical aspects of toddlers’ language in European Portuguese: Developmental trends, age and gender differences. First Language 37:3  pp. 267 ff. DOI logo
van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen
2017. VP‐Ellipsis. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition,  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Cyrino, Sonia & Gabriela Matos
2016. Null Objects and VP Ellipsis in European and Brazilian Portuguese. In The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics,  pp. 294 ff. DOI logo
Haznedar, Belma & F. Nihan Ketrez
2016. Introduction. In The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 20],  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Lobo, Maria, Ana Lúcia Santos & Carla Soares-Jesel
2016. Syntactic structure and information structure: The acquisition of Portuguese clefts andBe-fragments. Language Acquisition 23:2  pp. 142 ff. DOI logo
Madeira, Ana
2016. Second Language Acquisition. In The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics,  pp. 578 ff. DOI logo
Santos, Ana Lúcia & Cristina Flores
2016. Comparing heritage speakers and late L2-learners of European Portuguese. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6:3  pp. 308 ff. DOI logo
Sato, Yosuke & Simin Karimi
2016. Subject-object asymmetries in Persian argument ellipsis and the anti-agreement theory. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1:1 DOI logo
Hengeveld, Kees & J. Lachlan Mackenzie
2015. Grammar and context in Functional Discourse Grammar. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)  pp. 203 ff. DOI logo
Lipták, Anikó & Andrés Saab
2014. No N-raising out of NPs in Spanish: ellipsis as a diagnostic of head movement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 32:4  pp. 1247 ff. DOI logo
Rothman, Jason, David Giancaspro & Becky Halloran
2014. On the structural basis of non-redundant acquisition. In Portuguese-Spanish Interfaces [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 1],  pp. 317 ff. DOI logo

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Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CFDC: Language acquisition

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
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U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2008050227 | Marc record