Pilar Barbosa

When reduced input leads to delayed acquisition: A study on the acquisition of clitic placement by Portuguese heritage speakers

This article examines the competence of heritage speakers of Portuguese living in Germany with respect to clitic placement in Portuguese by comparing their performance with that of monolingual speakers of the same age (7–15 years of age) in a test designed to elicit oral production data. The results of the study indicate that the heritage speakers go through stages in the acquisition of clitic placement that are similar to those of monolingual acquirers even though they take longer to attain the target grammar.

Ainda a questão dos sujeitos pré-verbais em PE: uma resposta a Costa (2001)

Este artigo examina os argumentos de Costa 2001 contra a proposta de que os sujeitos nao se elevam por movimento A para Spec-IP em Portugues Europeu (PE) e defende que nenhum deles infirma a referida proposta. Apesar de esta parecer, a partida, contra-intuitiva, tem a enorme vantagem de se integrar numa teoria do Parâmetro do Sujeito Nulo, que, sendo extremamente simples, tem um alcance empirico consideravel. Em particular, e capaz de predizer nao so o leque de propriedades classicamente atribuidas as Linguas de Sujeito Nulo como uma serie de outros fenomenos que, a partida, nenhuma outra teoria e capaz de prever. A teoria que defende que os sujeitos ocupam a posicao canonica pode parecer mais intuitiva, mas tem uma capacidade preditiva pobre e exige uma serie de assuncoes adicionais para lidar com os fenomenos referidos.

Pro-drop and theories of pro in the minimalist program part 1 : consistent null subject languages and the pronominal-agr hypothesis

Some languages allow for phonetically null arguments in certain environments. Others do not. This phenomenon, known as pro-drop, arose particular interest in the 80s with the theory of Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981) and the advent of a principles and parameters approach to the theory of grammar. One particularly well-studied phenomenon was subject drop in rich agreement, Italian-type languages, where the occurrence of null subjects correlates with a set of other syntactic properties, thus suggesting that the same abstract property is responsible for apparently unrelated syntactic phenomena. This article starts by reviewing the classic Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981) approach to pro-drop, according to which a phonetically null pronominal argument (pro) is an inherently unspecified nominal projection whose features are supplied contextually. In the case of the rich agreement null subject languages, it was assumed that pro’s ϕ-features are identified by Agr. This view is incompatible with the approach to feature theory developed in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001) given that, in this theory, the ϕ-features in T (=Agr) are uninterpretable and thus not specified for a particular value. In Part 1 of this article we concentrate on the family of analyses that propose that what characterizes the null subject languages of the rich agreement type is that the head bearing subject agreement has a nominal specification and valued phi-features; i.e., Agr behaves like a pronoun spelled out as an affix. In particular, we focus on the consequences of such a hypothesis for the cluster of properties associated with the (rich agreement) consistent null subject languages and for a theory of pro.

pro as a Minimal nP: Towards a Unified Approach to pro-drop

In this article, I examine the properties of the partial null subject languages (NSLs) when compared with the consistent and the discourse pro-drop languages and argue that the same basic mechanism underlies pro-drop in partial as well as discourse pro-drop: namely, null NP anaphora, as originally proposed in Tomioka 2003 for discourse pro-drop. The two sets of languages show a correlation between the occurrence of null arguments and the availability of a bare nominal in argument position. I suggest that the null element is a default, minimally specified nominal—the same item that arguably appears as a complement of D in pronouns. It is a proform that minimally consists of the categorizing head n, lacking a root, the meaning of which is ‘entity’ (a property that is trivially true of any individual in the domain). nP introduces a variable that may be bound under Existential Closure, yielding the impersonal interpretation; otherwise, its denotation is type-shifted to an individual (ɩ) under the appropriate conditions. The crosslinguistic differences found in the interpretation of the null subject depend on the resources available in particular languages for application of ɩ type-shifting: the (bare NP) languages that lack such resources only have quasi-argumental and impersonal null subjects (semi pro-drop languages). Finally, I show that the idea that pro reduces to [nP e] can also be successfully extended to the consistent NSLs, provided it is assumed that, in this type of NSL, the head bearing agreement morphology bears a D-feature and interpretable ϕ-features.

Null objects in the spontaneous speech of monolingual and bilingual speakers of European Portuguese

Abstract This paper investigates object omissions in the spontaneous production of European Portuguese by second-generation Portuguese-German bilingual speakers and compares them to first-generation migrants, and two age-matched groups of monolingual speakers. The results show that bilingual speakers as well as the younger generation of monolinguals show a higher number of null objects in their speech than the two older generations. This may reflect an inter-generational development that favours null objects, which is independent of language contact. The analysis of the syntactic and semantic conditions determining the occurrence of null objects in the speech of the different groups reveals that the semantic properties of the null objects realized by the bilinguals, particularly the higher rates of animate and non-propositional null objects, show that they extend the semantic-pragmatic conditions of null object realization along a referential hierarchy. The bilingual speakers may reflect a language-internal pathway that appears to resemble a diachronic change observed in BP.

On subject realization in infinitival complements of causative and perceptual verbs in European Portuguese: Evidence from monolingual and bilingual speakers

This study aims to investigate knowledge of a heritage language (HL), i.e. the language of origin of bilingual speakers who grow up in the context of migration with exposure to the HL and the dominant language of the host country. We focus on European Portuguese (EP), and concentrate on bi-clausal infinitival complements of causative and perception verbs. These may have different forms depending on whether the infinitival complement is inflected or uninflected. In particular, the subject may be Nominative or Accusative. Two experimental tasks were applied, a Completion Task and an Acceptability Judgment Task, to a total of 60 adult informants: 30 native speakers raised in a monolingual context, and 30 heritage speakers (HSs), raised in a bilingual context with EP as home language and German as environmental language. Overall both groups demonstrate an evident preference for Accusative over Nominative Case marked subjects, regardless of the presence of inflection on the infinitive. Concerning the monolingual group, the most striking result regards the residual rates of Nominative Case marked subjects in the presence of an inflected infinitive in both tasks. This result is unexpected under standard assumptions concerning clause structure in EP. We offer an alternative analysis based on the idea that preverbal Nominative Case marked subjects in EP are (typically) left-dislocated topics (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou l998; Barbosa 1995). Left-dislocated topics in EP are assigned Nominative Case by default. On this view, preference for avoiding a Nominative subject in the presence of an inflected infinitive reduces to preference for the operation of raising to object over the last resort operation of default (Nominative) Case assignment. This preference can be viewed as an instance of the Paninian principle Blocking, whereby a general, default form is blocked by the existence of a more specific rival form. In this case, the default Case option is blocked by the more specific operation of raising to object. The most significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals concerns a higher rate of acceptance of Nominative pronouns by HSs, including in uninflected infinitives. This means that, on a par with the predominant raising to object option, the HSs allow Pilar Barbosa, Cristina Flores and Cátia Pereira, Universidade do Minho 126 Pilar Barbosa, Cristina Flores & Cátia Pereira for the default Case strategy; i.e., they fail to apply blocking. This strategy has also been attested in early stages of the acquisition of these constructions by EP monolingual children (Santos et al. 2016), a fact that reinforces the view that the process of acquisition of the HL is native-like in the sense that it goes through the same stages as the process of monolingual acquisition. However, by retaining an option that is no longer available in mature grammars, the HSs reveal protracted development.