Agreement Morphology and the Acquisition of Noun-Drop in Spanish

Abstract

Spanish exhibits a determiner phrase (DP)-internal phenomenon (noun-drop or N-drop) closely analogous to subject pro-drop. Where English has the near-vacuous nominal one in the DP the blue one, for example, Spanish lacks any overt nominal: el azul, literally 'the blue'. The availability of N-drop in a language has been linked by some authors to richness of the overt agreement morphology on adjectives, determiners, or both. The evidence from child language acquisition, however, runs counter to this view. In particular, a detailed case study of the longitudinal corpus of child Spanish data from Montes (1987) revealed that the child acquired the full Spanish system of DP-internal agreement morphology significantly earlier than she acquired N-drop. This finding indicates that rich agreement morphology is not in itself a sufficient condition for N-drop.