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Article published In:
Transitivity and Valency: From theory to acquisition
Edited by Georgia Fotiadou and Hélène Vassiliadou
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 40:1] 2017
► pp. 117–133

Clitics as input to the acquisition of verbal transitivity in French

| University of Toronto
| University of Toronto
| University of Toronto
| University of Toronto

We investigate the effect of French clitic construction on verb learning. In French, object pronouns precede the verb, and the canonical direct object position remains empty. We test whether children treat such contexts as input for transitivity (since a direct object is morphologically identified) or optional transitivity (due to the empty direct object position). Forty-eight monolingual French preschoolers heard verb input with clitics and noun phrases as direct objects, in two input conditions: obligatory transitivity, and mixed optional transitivity. Results show that children are sensitive to the input, but produce more sentences with null implicit objects in the clitic conditions. This provides evidence that specific properties of a language (e.g. clitic constructions), affect the acquisition of verbal classes.

Keywords: French, transitivity, verb classes, pronominal clitics, L1 acquisition, verbal classes, object omission, null objects, input, lexical conservatism, syntactic bootstrapping
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Verb input and learning
    • 1.1Input to transitivity across languages
    • 1.2Clitics in French
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials, procedures and design
    • 2.3Coding
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.40.1.06per
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