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 clitics and null objects in the appropriate pragmatic context. However, their knowledge of some syntactic constraints on null objects, which are grammatical only in certain contexts in the adult grammar, is not fully mastered yet. The results obtained provide additional evidence in support of the idea that some aspects of pragmatics are acquired early and that some aspects of syntactic knowledge are acquired late.