Part of
L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning: The view from RomanceEdited by Larisa Avram, Anca Sevcenco and Veronica Tomescu
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 65] 2021
► pp. 13–38
Edited by Larisa Avram, Anca Sevcenco and Veronica Tomescu
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 65] 2021
► pp. 13–38
Chapter 1Acquisition of clitic climbing by European Portuguese children
This study investigates the acquisition of clitic climbing by European Portuguese speaking children considering spontaneous production data from three children aged 1;5 to 3;11 (Santos’ corpus: Santos et al., 2014) and data from an elicited production task administered to 64 children aged 5;2 to 8;2. The study shows that: clitic climbing is acquired early, as expected for a parametric property that is dependent on the specification of the functional domain; there is early sensitivity to properties of the adult grammar, although children take a while to determine which specific verbs allow or disallow clitic climbing. In optional contexts younger children prefer clitic climbing constructions over non-climbing constructions. We discuss these results in light of the notion of complexity in language development.
Keywords: European Portuguese, clitic climbing, restructuring, complexity
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Clitic climbing and clitic placement in European Portuguese
- 2.2Clitic climbing and crosslinguistic variation
- 2.3Clitic climbing and intralinguistic variation
- 2.4Clitic climbing, restructuring and syntactic complexity
- 2.5The acquisition of clitic placement
- 2.6Research questions
- 3.Spontaneous production data
- 3.1Method
- 3.2Results
- 4.Elicited production study
- 4.1Methods
- 4.2Results
- 5.Discussion and conclusions
-
Acknowledgements -
Notes -
References -
Appendix
References (44)
Agathocleous, M., Charalambous, A., Papadopoulou, Ε., & Grohmann, K. K. (2014). The role of the social environment on linguistic development: A view from Cypriot Greek clitic placement. In K. K. Grohmann & T. Neokleous (Eds.), Developments in the acquisition of clitics (pp. 42–87). Cambridge Scholars.
Andrade, A. L. de. (2010). The application of clitic climbing in European Portuguese and the role of register. In C. Borgonovo, M. Español-Echevarría, & P. Prévost (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 12th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 97–108). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Barbosa, P., Paiva, M. da C., & Martins, K. C. (2017). Clitic climbing in the speech of Braga and Lisbon. In P. Barbosa, M. da C. de Paiva, & C. Rodrigues (Eds.), Studies on variation in Portuguese (pp. 199–217). John Benjamins. 
Biberauer, T., A. Holmberg, I. Roberts, & M. Sheehan. (2014). Complexity in comparative syntax: The view from modern parametric theory. In F. Newmeyer & L. Preston (Eds.), Measuring grammatical complexity (pp. 103–127). Oxford University Press.
Cardinaletti, A., & Shlonsky, U. (2004). Clitic positions and restructuring in Italian. Linguistic Inquiry, 35(4), 519–557.
Cinque, G. (2004). ‘Restructuring’ and functional structure. In A. Belletti (Ed.), Structures and beyond: The cartography of syntactic structures (pp. 132–191). Oxford University Press.
(2006). Restructuring and functional heads: The cartography of syntactic structures (Vol. 4). Oxford University Press.
Costa, A. L. (2010). Estruturas contrastivas: Desenvolvimento do conhecimento explícito e da competência de escrita (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Lisbon.
Costa, J., Fiéis, A., & Lobo, M. (2015). Input variability and late acquisition: Clitic misplacement in European Portuguese. Lingua, 61, 10–26.
Costa, J., & Lobo, M. (2007). Complexidade e omissão de clíticos: O caso dos reflexos. In M. Lobo & A. Coutinho (Eds.) XXII Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística. Textos Seleccionados (pp. 303–313). APL.
Duarte, I. (2003). Padrões de colocação dos pronomes clíticos. In M. H. M. Mateus, A. M. Brito, I. Duarte, I. H. Faria, S. Frota, G. Matos, F. Oliveira, M. Vigário, & A. Villalva (Eds.), Gramática da língua portuguesa (5th ed., pp. 847–867). Caminho.
Duarte, I., & Matos, G. (2000). Romance clitics and the Minimalist Program. In J. Costa (Ed.), Portuguese syntax. New comparative studies (pp. 116–142). Oxford University Press.
Duarte, I., Matos, G., & Faria, I. (1995). Specificity of European Portuguese clitics in Romance. In I. Hub Faria & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Studies on the acquisition of Portuguese (pp. 129–154). APL/Colibri.
Eisenchlas, S. (2003). Clitics in child Spanish. First Language, 23(2), 193–211.
Fiéis, A., & Madeira, A. (2012). Predicados de controlo na diacronia do português. In A. Costa, C. Flores, & N. Alexandre (Eds.), Textos selecionados do XXVII Encontro da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (pp. 271–284). Lisboa: APL.
Fiéis, A., Madeira, A., & Xavier, M. F. (2013). Clitic climbing in L2 Portuguese. In J. Cabrelli Amaro, T. Judy, & D. Pascual y Cabo, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 12) (pp. 39–49). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Gonçalves, A. (1999). Predicados complexos verbais em contextos de infinitivo não preposicionado do Português Europeu. Doctoral dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa.
(2002). Verbos auxiliares e verbos de reestruturação do Português Europeu. In I. M. Duarte, J. Barbosa, S. Matos, & T. Hüsgen (Eds.), Actas do Encontro Comemorativo dos 25 Anos do Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto (Vol. 2, pp. 45–57). Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto.
Grohmann, K. K., & Leivada, E. (2012). Interface ingredients of dialect design. Bi-x, socio-syntax of development, and the grammar of Cypriot Greek. In A. M. Di Sciulio (Ed.), Towards a biolinguistic understanding of grammar. Essays on interfaces (pp. 239–262). John Benjamins.
Grüter, T. (2006). Object clitics and null objects in the acquisition of French (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). McGill University, Montreal.
Guasti, M. T. (1993/1994). Verb syntax in Italian child grammar: Finite and nonfinite verbs. Language Acquisition, 3(1), 1–40.
(2016). Language acquisition. The growth of grammar (2nd ed.). The MIT Press.
Hamann, C., & Belletti, A. (2006). Developmental patterns in the acquisition of complement clitic pronouns. Comparing different acquisition modes with an emphasis on French. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, 31, 39–78.
Hamann, C., Rizzi, L., & Frauenfelder, U. H. (1996). On the acquisition of subject and object clitics in French. In H. Clahsen (Ed.), Generative perspectives on language acquisition (pp. 309–334). John Benjamins.
Haverkort, J. M. W. (1993). Clitics and parametrization: Case studies in the interaction of head movement phenomena (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Brabant Catholic University.
Hollebrandse, B., Hobbs, K., de Villiers, J., & Roeper, T. (2008). Second order embedding and second order false belief. In A. Gavarro & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Language acquisition and development. Proceedings of GALA 2007 (pp. 270–280). Cambridge Scholars.
Jakubowicz, C. (2011). Measuring derivational complexity: New evidence from typically developing and SLI learners of L1 French. Lingua, 121(3), 339–351.
Kayne, R. (1989). Null subjects and clitic climbing. In O. Jaeggli & K. Safir (Eds.), The null subject parameter (pp. 239–261). Reidel.
Kirby, S. (2011). Move over, control freaks: Syntactic raising as a cognitive default. In N. Danis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (Eds.), BUCLD 35 Online Proceedings Supplement. Retrieved from [URL]
Martins, A. M. (2000). A minimalist approach to clitic climbing. In J. Costa (Org.), Portuguese syntax: New comparative studies (pp. 169–190). Oxford University Press.
(2013). Posição dos pronomes pessoais clíticos. In E. B. P. Raposo et al. (Eds.) Gramática do Português (Vol. II, pp. 2231–2302). Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
Nardelli Cestari, M., & Lobo, M. (2018). Clitic omission in bilingual Portuguese-Spanish acquisition. In A. Gavarró (Ed.), On the acquisition of the syntax of Romance (pp. 119–145). John Benjamins.
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Cuza, A., & Thomas, D. (2011). Clitic placement in Spanish/English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(2), 221–232.
Rizzi, L. (1982). Issues in Italian syntax. Foris.
Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, M., Snyder, W., & Sugisaki, K. (2006). Clitic-climbing in child Spanish and the theory of parameters. In A. Brugos, M. R. Clark-Cotton, & S. Ha (Eds.), BUCLD 29 Online Proceedings Supplement. Retrieved from [URL]
Santos, A. L., Généreux, M., Cardoso, A., Agostinho, C., & Abalada, S. (2014). A corpus of European Portuguese child and child-directed speech. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation – LREC 2014 (pp. 1488–1491). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Santos, A. L., Gonçalves, A., & Hyams, N. (2016). Aspects of the acquisition of object control and ECM-type verbs in European Portuguese. Language Acquisition, 23(3), 199–233.
Silva, C. (2008). Assimetrias na aquisição de clíticos diferenciados em português europeu (Unpublished Master’s thesis). Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Vitorino, I. (2017). Aquisição de estruturas com subida de clítico em português europeu (Unpublished Master’s thesis). Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Wanner, D. (1987). The development of Romance clitic pronouns. From Latin to Old Romance. Mouton de Gruyter.
Wexler, K. (1998). Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua, 106, 23–79.
Wexler, K., Gavarró, A., & Torrens, V. (2004). Feature checking and object clitic omission in child Catalan and Spanish. In R. Bok-Bennema, B. Hollebrandse, B. Kampers-Manhe, & P. Sleeman, (Eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2002 (pp. 253–268). John Benjamins.
Wurmbrand, S. (2003[2001]). Infinitives. Restructuring and clause structure. Mouton de Gruyter.
(2006). Verb clusters, verb raising and restructuring. In M. Everaert & H. Riemsdijk (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax (Vol. V, pp. 229–343). Blackwell.