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. 83–108
This paper discusses the subject / object control asymmetry in child language acquisition. Based on data reflecting the acquisition of European Portuguese, I argue that children do not have an initial absolute preference for object control and that not only subject control but also object control structures show developmental effects. This argues against analyses which assume that children are initially guided only by syntactic principles that preclude a non-local controller. Even though not excluding a syntactic bias that may favour object control, the acquisition data reviewed in this paper show that lexical acquisition has a larger role in the acquisition of control structures than is often assumed.