The syntax of subjects in the acquisition of Spanish and Catalan

Abstract

In the acquisition literature, the phenomenon of early null subjects has received a lot of attention over the past two decades, especially in the case of non null subject languages.

Inversion in wh-questions in child Romance and child English

“…Here again, the available evidence indicates that there is early convergence on the possibility of these two subject positions. Bel (2003) shows that in the case of María, both preverbal and postverbal subjects exist from a very early age, as shown in Figure 2. Moreover, it appears that María has assigned adult-like discourse roles to each of these positions, choosing the preverbal position for subjects that are contrastive or otherwise focused:…”

“…Null and overt subjects in child Spanish There is substantial evidence in the literature that children converge early on the idea that both null and overt subjects are allowed in Spanish, as well as in Catalan and Italian, which have very similar properties in this regard (Bel (2003), Valian (1991)). Bel (2003) discusses the case of María, for instance, a Spanish-speaking child whose null subject use is given in Figure 1.…”

“…Bel (2003) discusses the case of María, for instance, a Spanish-speaking child whose null subject use is given in Figure 1. Figure 1 shows the percentage of subjects that are null out of María"s overall subject use.…”

Null Subject Occurrence in Monolingual Spanish SLI: A Discriminant Function Analysis

“…The month-by-month data presented by Bel (2003), and Aguado-Orea and Pine (2002) to argue against the no-overt subject claim critically depends on the data of children such as María of the López-Ornat corpus. María's MLU in words (MLUw) in her earliest file is already 1.93, substantially greater than the MLUw of the Catalan-speaking children (mean MLUw = 1.55) and the MLUw of the Spanish-speaking children (mean MLUw = 1.55) in Grinstead and Spinner (2009).…”

“…Table 1 reports the ages of onset of overt subjects, wh-question and fronted objects in the longitudinal study of four Catalan-speaking children and three Spanish-speaking children (compiled 1 Bel (2003) month-by-month presentation of the Catalan data of Júlia, in which she uses 7.2% overt subjects in her earliest recording, at MLUw 1.5, is much more consistent with the no-overt subject stage claim than with the claim that she is using overt subjects in adult-like proportions (38% according to Casanovas 1999 Grinstead (1998) and for Romanian in Avram and Coene (2009). 3 The generic term "fronted objects" is used instead of the more specific focused objects (ESTO quiero yo 'This I want') or topicalized object (Esto, lo quiero 'This I want') because the two constructions are distinguished in adult Spanish by the presence of an accusative clitic in topicalization constructions, and children in the 2 year-old range are not consistent with their production of such clitics.…”