CNL Lunch

Ruth Lopes

Command and the acquisition of subject and object in Brazilian Portuguese

Thursday October 4th 2001, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

The asymmetry observed in the production of subjects and objects during the initial stages of language acquisition has been extensively studied in several languages, and studies show that young children tend to produce higher percentages of null subjects than of objects, even in languages which allow null object, such as Chinese.

My aim is to see what happens in Brazilian Portuguese, a language which also allows null objects. Nevertheless, I'm not only interested in the null elements, but also in their phonetic realization. My results show that although producing full DPs (determiner + NP) in object position, in subject position the child will either have a null element, a pronoun or a bare noun.

I examined data from a child from 1;9 to 3;0, recorded longitudinally. In order to advance an explanation for my findings, I make use of Uriagereka's Multiple Spell-out proposal, my central hypothesis being that the basic syntactic relation that is initially privileged by the child acquiring her language is that of command.