AQUISIÇÃO DE POSSESSIVOS

Abstract

This work deals with the acquisition of possessive forms in Brazilian Portuguese by a child over a period ranging from 1 year, 8 months e 25 days to 1 year, 10 months and days. It focuses specifically on the occurrence of first and second person forms (meu my and seu your e their gender and number variants) in two positions in the noun phrase, namely, before and after the head noun with which they associate; these two positions are supposed to relate to two distinct phases of the acquisition process. The pre-nominal position of the possessive is interpreted as evidence of the presence of a functional category (Nu/Agr) in whose specifier it lands. The post-nominal position, on the other hand, may be taken as signaling the absence of such a category. By the same taken, the absence of a D(eterminer) phonetically realized may be taken either to evince the lack of that category in the child’s grammar or to merely indicate his/her lack of knowledge of the phonetic matrix of the item that may fill the D position present in his/her grammar all the while. Two acquisition hypotheses are considered: the truncation theory (Rizzi, 1994) and the full competence hypothesis (Kato, 1995 b) with reference to the presence or absence of the functional categories (D and Nu/Agr) in the child’s early production. Both theories give only a partial account of the data analyzed; however, theory internal reasons seem to favor the full competence hypothesis over the truncation approach.