Early Catalan OV Sequences: Empirical Evidence for the Poverty of Stimulus Argument*

After all the criticism Pullum and Scholz (2002a) have received, the best way of contributing something new to the debate of the Poverty of Stimulus (POS) argument and linguistic nativism was to discuss some empirical evidence of the kind these authors claim to be missing in the generative literature. In this paper, I explore the idea that, as suggested by other authors (Rosselló, Llinàs and Bel, in press), OV sequences occurring with telic verbs in early Catalan (Llinàs-Grau 1998; Llinàs-Grau and Coll-Alfonso 2001) constitute robust evidence for the POS argument. OV sequences do not have an observable adult counterpart. Yet, they happen to be systematically produced around 2 years of age, as confirmed by the data of four Catalan children which parallel other existing data on the same issue. The adult input has also been analysed to see to what extent OV sequences could be claimed to be inexistent in the data the children were exposed to.