Ana Lúcia Santos

Minimal Answers: Ellipsis, Syntax, and Discourse in the Acquisition of European Portuguese

This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the acquisition of the syntax-discourse interface. It provides evidence that children acquiring European Portuguese have a very early ability to spontaneously produce VP ellipsis as answers to yes-no questions. It is also argued that the distribution of VP ellipsis in European Portuguese (including its co-existence with Null Complement Anaphora) supports the hypothesis that the identification condition on ellipsis is derivable from some innate knowledge of the syntax-discourse interface. Answers to yes-no questions also provide evidence concerning children’s interpretation of questions containing a cleft or the operator so ‘only’. The analysis of spontaneous production is complemented by a comprehension experiment, showing that children have two problems in the interpretation of these questions: (i) they do not understand that the cleft and so introduce a presupposition and (ii) they start with a default focus assignment strategy and may not access other focus interpretations.

Diverse Macroids and Rhodoliths from the Upper Pleistocene of Baja California Sur, Mexico

Abstract BAARLI, B.G.; SANTOS, A.; DA SILVA, C.M.; LEDESMA-VÁZQUEZ, J.; MAYORAL, E.; CACHÃO, M., and JOHNSON, M.E., 2012. Diverse macroids and rhodoliths from the Upper Pleistocene of Baja California Sur, Mexico. Small multitaxonomical nodules, characterized as rhodoliths, balanuliths, coralliths, bryoliths, and nodules composed of vermetids “vermetuliths,” are described from one horizon in carbonate sand from the Upper Pleistocene Mulegé Formation at Playa La Palmita, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Such a diversity of fossil, free-rolling biota is seldom described in the literature. This is the first time vermetuliths are reported in the fossil record; in addition, the coral Astrangia has not been reported to constitute coralliths before. These nodules and their associated firm-ground were generated in a shallow bay near rocky shores. Break up of a firm-ground during a sedimentary hiatus provided fragments of loosely consolidated, carbonate sandstone for organic nucleation. Fast growers, like balanids, vermetids, and bryozoans, settled on these sandstone fragments or on bioclasts. Initial rapid growth of pioneer organisms was succeeded by a period of bioerosion, and finally, encrustation with a thin, crustose to lumpy cover of coralline red algae in the climax stage of succession. These were insipient rhodoliths, where the thin cover of coralline red algae reflects a short residence time. Also evident is a rich crypto- and endofauna that lived within and an epifauna that lived on the nodules.

Age and input effects in the acquisition of mood in Heritage Portuguese

The present study analyzes the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of fifty bilingual children (six- to sixteen-year-olds) who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German dominant environment. The results show a significant effect of the age at testing and the amount of input in the acquisition of the subjunctive. In general, acquisition is delayed with respect to monolinguals, even though higher convergence with the monolingual grammar is observed after twelve years of age. Results also reveal that children with more exposure to the heritage language at home show faster acquisition than children from mixed households: the eight- to nine-year-old age boundary seems relevant for those speakers with more exposure, and the twelve- to thirteen-year-old age boundary for those with less exposure.

Aspects of the acquisition of object control and ECM-Type verbs in European Portuguese

ABSTRACT We investigate the acquisition of sentential complementation under causative, perception, and object control verbs in European Portuguese, a language rich in complement types, including the typologically marked inflected infinitives. We tested 58 children between 3 and 5 years of age and 24 adults on a sentence completion task. The results support two main hypotheses concerning children’s initial biases in representing complement structure. The first pertains to argument structure—a verb selects only one internal (propositional) argument (Single Argument Selection Hypothesis), the other to syntactic structure—propositional complements are complete functional complements (Complete Functional Complement Hypothesis). These initial biases lead children to avoid raising-to-object and object control structures, in favor of finite complements and inflected infinitive complements, the latter appearing in both target and nontarget contexts.

Parents’ reports of lexical and grammatical aspects of toddlers’ language in European Portuguese: Developmental trends, age and gender differences:

The results from a large-scale study on toddlers’ language acquisition in European Portuguese are presented. Toddlers’ lexical and grammatical competencies were assessed using the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The results, based on 3012 reports completed by parents, indicate an increase in the lexical size and on five measures of grammatical development (production of regular morphology, irregular morphology, over-regularizations, mean length of utterances and sentence complexity) across age groups. A main effect of gender was found for lexical size, production of regular and irregular morphology, production of over-regularizations and sentence complexity, with girls obtaining overall higher scores than boys. All lexical and grammatical development measures are positively correlated, even after controlling for age and gender effects. These findings are discussed in terms of their consistency with those obtained for other languages.

Syntactic structure and information structure: the acquisition of Portuguese clefts and be-fragments

ABSTRACT This article investigates the acquisition of different types of clefts and of be-fragments in European Portuguese. We first present the main syntactic and discourse properties of different cleft structures and of be-fragments in European Portuguese, and we discuss how data from first language acquisition may contribute to evaluate different theoretical proposals. Based on data from spontaneous production and on data from an elicited production task, we argue that: (i) there is a clear asymmetry, stemming from intervention effects, between subject clefts and object/adjunct clefts, not only in spontaneous production but also in elicited data, which confirms previous findings on other structures involving A’ dependencies; (ii) the production of elided clefts is easier to the children’s processing system than the production of full standard clefts; (iii) acquisition data confirm the analysis of certain fragments (be-fragments) as elided clefts; (iv) the asymmetry between clefts featuring a wh-constituent and other clefts should be understood as late development of a particular type of anaphoric dependency.

How relative are purpose relative clauses

Abstract In this paper, we present extended argumentation against a raising analysis for every type of relative clauses. Specifically, we argue that purpose relative clauses involve raising of a null operator to Spec,CP, contrary to that-relatives, which involve raising of the antecedent DP. We further argue that this analysis applies to all purpose relative clauses, both subject and object purpose relatives. After showing that all purpose relatives in European Portuguese are CPs, we present several arguments in favor of a null operator analysis of this type of structure. First, we show that parasitic gap effects support the existence of a variable in object purpose relatives and in VP adjunct purpose clauses with an object gap. We then show that Principle A effects in object purpose relatives allow to distinguish this type of relatives from that-relatives and support a null operator analysis of the former. The same analysis is shown to apply to subject purpose relatives. Second, we compare European Portuguese to Capeverdean, a Portuguese-related creole. We claim that the properties of purpose relative clauses in Capeverdean show that the derivation of such clauses is different from the derivation of that-relatives, although wh-movement applies in both. Finally, we suggest that an analysis distinguishing the structure of object purpose relatives from the one of object that-relatives may contribute to explain some acquisition facts: if purpose relatives involve movement of a null operator instead of movement of a DP, they do not give rise to intervention effects that violate the version of Relativized Minimality which Friedmann et al. (2009) argue children assume.

Sequence of tenses in complementation structures: Lexical restrictions and effects on language acquisition

In this paper we discuss the combinations of tenses in main and complement clauses of European Portuguese, focusing on the issue that restrictions on the tenses allowed in complement clauses are observed with some predicates but not with others. We show that these lexical restrictions are independent of the mood occurring in the complement clause, though an integrated analysis of mood and tense may be achieved. The proposal is made that the observed lexical restrictions on embedded tenses have a semantic basis and follow from the fact that Portuguese is an SOT-language, that is, a language where embedded tenses have semantic import. A preliminary investigation is conducted on the sequences of tenses produced at early stages of language acquisition.

Periferias esquerda e direita: assimetrias

In this paper, we compare the right and the left peripheries in European Portuguese, presenting evidence for the analysis of the right-peripheral material as elliptical in nature. We discuss several analyses for the right periphery in light of European Portuguese data, including: (i) data from spontaneous adult (child-directed) speech (5 adults, 29,398 utterances) annotated in the corpus Santos (Santos, 2006/2009; Santos et al ., 2014) and (ii) experimental data (41 children aged between 3;5 and 6;3, and 30 adults) on the comprehension of topicalizations, clitic-left dislocations, post-focal subjects on the right periphery, and subject-verb inversions with a focused subject (Abalada, 2011).