Abstract
Few studies have assessed children’s comprehension of the null infinitival subject (PRO) in Obligatory Control complements when the matrix object is implicit. A study on European Portuguese showed that children have poor comprehension of control complements of dizer “tell” with an implicit object controller, displaying high rates of subject control with this verb (Gamas, 2016). Moreover, Mateu (2016) found that both Spanish and English-speaking children performed at adult level with subject control complements of promise-type verbs when the matrix object is implicit. Our experiment tested children’s comprehension of control with prometer “promise” and dizer “tell” with overt and implicit objects. The results show that, in the case of sentences with implicit objects, children obtained significantly higher rates of object control with dizer than with prometer, despite high rates of (non-adult) subject control with dizer. Furthermore, children obeyed the locality of Obligatory Control and were sensitive to the properties of the main verb.
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Notes
- 1.
Hornstein and Polinsky (2010) pointed out that there is variation among adult English speakers with regard to the grammaticality of control structures with promise (e.g., Stockwell et al. 1973 characterized a sentence like John promised Mary PRO to wash himself as “only marginally grammatical”). Hornstein and Polinsky (2010) also noted that promise in control sentences occurs more frequently without an overt object.
- 2.
For the comprehension of control structures by atypically developing children acquiring EP, namely children diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment and children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders, the reader is referred to Martins et al. (2018).
- 3.
The original Portuguese is as follows:
Test sentence: O cordeirinho consegue encontrar os morangos.
Exp. 2 (using the puppet): Quem é que vai encontrar os morangos?
- 4.
The original Portuguese is as follows:
Test sentence: O canguru diz para pôr a mesa.
Exp. 2 (using the puppet): Quem vai pôr a mesa?
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to everyone who contributed towards this research with their time, expertise and resources: Ana Lúcia Santos (Universidade de Lisboa), for comments on the methodology and the data, Alice de Jesus, for her help in the recording of the videos used in the experiment, and Amália Mendes, for making available the recording room at the Instituto para a Investigação Interdisciplinar da Universidade de Lisboa. The authors also wish to thank the schools where testing took place, namely Externato da Luz, SASUL—Jardim de Infância dos Serviços Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, and APIST—Associação de Profissionais do Instituto Superior Técnico. A very special thanks goes to the children who agreed to participate in this experiment and their parents, as well as the adults who volunteered for the control group. Without them this study would not have been possible. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. This research was supported by the projects La variación en la interfaz léxico-sintaxis (FFI2014-56968-C4-1-P) and Desarrollo, adquisición y mecanismos de variación lingüística (FFI2017-87699-P) of the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
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Agostinho, C., Gavarró, A. (2020). The Acquisition of Implicit Control in European Portuguese. In: Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Suárez-Gómez, C. (eds) New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1932-0_9
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