On the Non-Parallelism in the Acquisition of Reflexive and Non-Reflexive Object Clitics

In this article, we want to study the development of French reflexive clitics in relation to the acquisition of ordinary non-reflexive object clitics. In Muller et al. (1996), we argued that the emergence of the full object clitic paradigm and its target-consistent use is tied to the instantiation of the C-system. As for the adult system, we assumed that non-reflexive object clitics license and identify a pro object in syntax. Reflexive clitics, however, involve argument absorption which arguably is a presyntactic process, yielding a syntactic representation with one thematic role less (Grimshaw, 1982; Wehrli, 1986). Given this, we would expect reflexives not to interact with other syntactic constituents, like e.g., the C-system. Interestingly enough, reflexive clitics are already used sporadically during a stage where their non-reflexive counterparts are still systematically lacking. Furthermore, placement errors are attested with reflexive clitics in constructions which contain an analytic verb form, errors which are nonexistent with their non-reflexive counterparts. Moreover, these placement errors coincide with the selection of the wrong auxiliary, namely avoir instead of etre. We will argue in particular that the acquisition pattern is attributed to the unavailability of complex morphological words in the child’s initial grammatical representation, i.e., morphological objects which map onto more than one single syntactic atom. In contrast to the target analysis in terms of a verb cluster, the children analyze French auxiliary+participle constructions as a hierarchical VP, where the auxiliary selects a VP complement.