Subject Distribution and Verb Classesin Child Catalan

The null subject parameter is a well-studied phenomenon, but what is relatively unexplored is the acquisition of null subjects in the null subject languages, and their distribution with respect to different verb classes. In this paper we undertake the study of the acquisition of null subjects in child Catalan; our goals are two-fold: to establish whether there are systematic differences between child and adult Catalan regarding the occurrence of null subjects, and to find out whether verb class differences emerge in relation to subject distribution and, if they do, what they can be attributed to. The paper is organised as follows. First, we present previous related findings in the acquisition literature. Second, we describe the source of our data and the methods used to analyse it and we present the results of the analysis. Third, we consider how our results fit in with what is known so far about the acquisition of unaccusatives and draw our conclusions.

[1]  Elena Anagnostopoulou,et al.  Symmetries, Asymmetries and the Role of Agreement , 1996 .

[2]  F. Ordóñez,et al.  Word order and clausal structure in Spanish and other Romance languages , 1997 .

[3]  Virginia Valian.  Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children , 1991, Cognition.

[4]  J. S. Y. Pujols,et al.  Agreement and subjects , 1992 .

[5]  Aafke Hulk,et al.  Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages , 2001, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

[6]  Anna Gavarró,et al.  Feature Checking and Object Clitic Omission in Child Catalan and Spanish , 2004 .

[7]  J. Grinstead.  Subjects and Interface Delay in Child Spanish and Catalan , 2004 .

[8]  Noam Chomsky.  Derivation by phase , 1999 .

[9]  Francisco Ordóñez,et al.  Left dislocated subjects and the pro-drop parameter: A case study of Spanish☆ , 1999 .

[10]  A. Pierce.  The Acquisition of Passives in Spanish and the Question of A-Chain Maturation. , 1992 .

[11]  Hagit Borer,et al.  The Maturation of Syntax , 1987 .

[12]  Kenneth Wexler,et al.  The Maturation of Grammatical Principles: Evidence from Russian Unaccusatives , 2001, Linguistic Inquiry.

[13]  L. Rizzi.  The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery , 1997 .

[14]  Aurora Bel.  The syntax of subjects in the acquisition of Spanish and Catalan , 2003 .

[15]  J. Pine,et al.  There is no evidence for a ‘no overt subject’ stage in early child Spanish: a note on Grinstead (2000) , 2002, Journal of Child Language.

[16]  C Caprin,et al.  Overt subject distribution in early Italian children , 2005 .

[17]  L. Serratrice.  The role of discourse pragmatics in the acquisition of subjects in Italian , 2005 .