Pronominal Subjects

Abstract

The analysis of French subject pronouns as inflectional clitics as S-structure underlies my account of subject pronoun distribution in French child language mentioned in the previous chapter. This chapter compares the acquisition of subject pronouns in French and English. I claim that the comparative child language data support a syntactic distinction between subject pronouns in the two languages. While these pronominals behave as syntactic clitics in early French, they do not in early English. The acquisition data therefore serve as a surprising source of evidence for a particular analysis of these elements in the grammar of spoken French. The first section of this chapter gives some background on this issue. I then return to French child language, further examining the behavior of subject pronouns. Finally, patterns in the distribution of these pronouns in French are shown to contrast with the distribution of subject pronouns in English child language.