Input variability and late acquisition: Clitic misplacement in European Portuguese

João Costa,Alexandra Fiéis,Maria Lobo

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.05.009

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the acquisition of clitic placement by European Portuguese children aged 5, 6 and 7, using an elicitation task. Contrarily to what has been found for other languages, where children correctly place clitic pronouns from a very early age, our results show that European Portuguese children still misplace clitics at age 7, although there is a developmental effect from 5 to 7: they overuse enclisis in proclisis contexts, but not the other way round. This confirms previous studies based on spontaneous production. Our study shows, however, that: i) the rates of clitic misplacement are not identical in all proclisis contexts; ii) proclisis is acquired earlier in some contexts; iii) the contexts that are harder to acquire are the ones where we find more variability in the adult control group, and where diachronic data are not so categorical. We argue that, since clitic placement in European Portuguese is not linked to the finite/non finite distinction, there is a slower developmental path, reflecting the complexity of the input and the specific properties of lexical items and syntactic contexts.

Highlights

Crosslinguistic acquisition studies show that word order phenomena are usually acquired very early: children’s first productions are consistent with the head directionality of their target language and with verb placement related to finiteness and with verb movement.Studies on the acquisition of clitics show that, there may be clitic omission in initial stages of language acquisition, in most languages clitics are placed in a target-like manner
Clitic misplacement has been described for European Portuguese (EP) based on spontaneous production data, there are no systematic studies on the acquisition of clitic placement in EP, which, at the same time, control for different syntactic contexts
We present the global results, divided by age group, the conditions being arranged according to the target position of the clitic: enclisis (Table 2) or proclisis (Table 3)

Summary

Introduction

Crosslinguistic acquisition studies show that word order phenomena are usually acquired very early: children’s first productions are consistent with the head directionality of their target language and with verb placement related to finiteness and with verb movement.Studies on the acquisition of clitics show that, there may be clitic omission in initial stages of language acquisition, in most languages clitics are placed in a target-like manner (see Guasti, 1993/94; Wexler et al, 2004; Hamann et al, 1996; Grüter, 2006; Marinis, 2000; among others). In European Portuguese (EP) and in Cypriot Greek, children seem to display deviant patterns of clitic placement (see Duarte et al, 1995; Petinou and Terzi, 2002; Neokleous, in press). These two languages differ from other languages in that the patterns of clitic placement are not linked to finiteness. Clitic misplacement has been described for EP based on spontaneous production data (see Duarte et al, 1995), there are no systematic studies on the acquisition of clitic placement in EP, which, at the same time, control for different syntactic contexts.

Methods

Results

Conclusion