CLITIC OMISSION IS NULL OBJECT : EVIDENCE FROM COMPREHENSION *

The phenomenon of 3rd person singular accusative clitic omission has been widely studied in the literature on language acquisition crosslinguistically. Schaeffer (1997), Wexler et al. (2003) Tsakali & Wexler (2003), among many other authors, report that clitics can be omitted in early stages of linguistic development. However, it appears that there is quite some degree of crosslinguistic variation in the development of clitic production. Wexler et al. (2003) contend that clitics are omitted only in some languages, namely in those languages in which there is past participle agreement. In languages without past participle agreement, clitics are not omitted in the early stages of development. Wexler et al. (2003) further argue that the stage of development in which clitics can be omitted correlates with the age at which root infinitives are produced. This proposal is challenged in studies like Jakubowicz et al. (1996), who report that clitic are omitted in French – a language with past participle agreement past the root infinitive stage. These aparently contradictory results find an easy explanation if there is no single source for clitic omission crosslinguistically. For European Portuguese, Costa and Lobo (2005) found that clitics are omitted after age 4, i.e. beyond the age in which root infinitives are produced in those languages that have it. It was further found that the rate of omission was much higher than the rates found for other languages.