Clitic Omission, Null Objects or Both in the Acquisition of European Portuguese?

Null objects and early pragmatics in the acquisition of European Portuguese

In this paper, we argue that clitic omission in European Portuguese speaking children cannot be due to a late acquisition of pragmatics. Based on experimental data from an elicited production task and a truth-value judgement task, we show that children acquiring European Portuguese as a first language know the appropriate pragmatic conditions for producing clitics and null objects and interpret...

Correlation with Null Objects?

There is a wide consensus in the literature on language acquisition that functional elements are acquired late, although there is crosslinguistic variation with respect to those elements that are produced later and to the rates of omission for different languages (see Radford 1994, Guasti 2002 for relevant data and for a review of the literature). Since pronominal clitics are elements whose syn...

Clitic Omission in The Acquisition of European Portuguese: Data from Comprehension

Testing Syntactic and Pragmatic Accounts of Clitic Omission

The idea has been put forward that pragmatic factors as well as syntactic factors play a role in the production and omission patterns of object clitics in child Romance. We will argue that, although pragmatics may play a role in the languages with some sort of null object – such as European Portuguese and some varieties of French –, in the Romance languages without such an element there is no n...

Cross-Linguistic Transfer of Object Clitic Structure: A Case of L3 Brazilian Portuguese

This study examines the role of previously known language in L3 Brazilian Portuguese (BP) object expression acquisition. It investigates the claims of the main models of L3 transfer, the cumulative enhancement model (CEM) (Flynn et al. 2004), the L2 status factor (Bardel and Falk 2007) and the typological proximity model (TPM) (Rothman 2011) in both comprehension and production tasks. It also a...