Part of
L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning: The view from RomanceEdited by Larisa Avram, Anca Sevcenco and Veronica Tomescu
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 65] 2021
► pp. 13–38
Edited by Larisa Avram, Anca Sevcenco and Veronica Tomescu
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 65] 2021
► pp. 13–38
Chapter 1Acquisition of clitic climbing by European Portuguese children
This study investigates the acquisition of clitic climbing by European Portuguese speaking children considering spontaneous production data from three children aged 1;5 to 3;11 (Santos’ corpus: Santos et al., 2014) and data from an elicited production task administered to 64 children aged 5;2 to 8;2. The study shows that: clitic climbing is acquired early, as expected for a parametric property that is dependent on the specification of the functional domain; there is early sensitivity to properties of the adult grammar, although children take a while to determine which specific verbs allow or disallow clitic climbing. In optional contexts younger children prefer clitic climbing constructions over non-climbing constructions. We discuss these results in light of the notion of complexity in language development.
Keywords: European Portuguese, clitic climbing, restructuring, complexity
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Clitic climbing and clitic placement in European Portuguese
- 2.2Clitic climbing and crosslinguistic variation
- 2.3Clitic climbing and intralinguistic variation
- 2.4Clitic climbing, restructuring and syntactic complexity
- 2.5The acquisition of clitic placement
- 2.6Research questions
- 3.Spontaneous production data
- 3.1Method
- 3.2Results
- 4.Elicited production study
- 4.1Methods
- 4.2Results
- 5.Discussion and conclusions
-
Acknowledgements -
Notes -
References -
Appendix
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