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L'Adquisició del català en infants portuguesos: Un estudi sobre l'ús i el coneixement dels pronoms clítics
Abstract
Clitic pronouns represent one of the most idiosyncratic properties of Catalan
due to their polymorphism as well as to their syntactic and discursive functions. The
participants in this study are 4 L1 Portuguese children learning Catalan and a control
group of 6 L1 Catalan children. Both groups are aged between 11 and 12 years and are
attending a Primary School in a Catalan immersion context in Andorra. The main
objectives are to observe and to analyze the usage and knowledge of the accusative and
dative clitic pronouns and those of the adverbial pronouns en and hi, the latter two in
their appearance in dislocated constructions. Portuguese has both accusative and dative
clitics but, unlike Portuguese, Catalan has obligatory pronouns for location (hi) and a
partitive pronoun (en). In Romance languages, focused phrases can move to the right or
to the left periphery depending on the speaker’s communicative intention. This structure
provides an additional pragmatics-informative value which can contribute to the
difficulties in the acquisition of Catalan as a second language by children. [Keywords:
Syntax; pragmatics; second language; acquisition; Catalan; Portuguese]
Full text link: http://www.romanistik.uni-freiburg.de/pusch/zfk/cat/2015.htm
... The delay and optionality in the appearance of object clitics has been explained as the result of computational complexity since omission or avoidances can alleviate the processing load (Hamann and Belletti 2006), or as the result of other linguistic properties of the language, such as participle agreement (Gavarró Anna et al. 2011); this is the explanation provided by these authors to account for the differences in omission rates between Catalan (a language with participle agreement) and Spanish (no participle agreement). However, Tarrés and Bel (2015), in a study of L2 Catalan children (7-year-olds from Portuguese families in Andorra) found that the use of dative and accusative clitics in L2 Catalan is very similar to that of monolingual Catalan children (around 66% of correct suppliance, 18% of omissions), with no errors in gender, number, or position, despite the fact that Portuguese has a different position for these clitics. Similar results were found in a follow-up study with more participants, this time also with francophone children (Tarrés and Bel 2017). ...
The present study explores two morphological differences in direct object expression between Spanish and Catalan: Differential Object Marking (DOM), and the accusative clitics el /l/ vs. ho /u/. Both phenomena are regulated by semantic features, such as animacy and specificity/definiteness. The study experimentally tested 57 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals with different degrees of language dominance in their comprehension and production of these Catalan constructions in order to explore the degree of structural convergence. The results show that with respect to DOM, bilinguals systematically accept ample optionality, creating a new language variety, the bilingual variety, with properties similar and different from both Spanish and Catalan. With respect to the accusative clitics, a certain degree of functional interference in the grammar of Spanish-dominant bilinguals is found. These results illustrate, on the one hand, structural convergence in DOM, culminating in an internal language change accelerated by language contact, and, on the other hand, incipient language transfer from the dominant language in the expression of accusative clitics.
This paper investigates the L2 acquisition of Spanish object clitics by L1 English learners. Spanish clitics are analyzed as bundles of agreement and referential features morphologically marked for number and gender. We examine the relationship between morphology and syntax in L2 learners' grammars in order to assess two current acquisition hypotheses: the Impaired Representation Hypothesis (IRH) and the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH). Data from a production and a comprehension task suggest that learners have an unimpaired narrow syntax, despite apparent inflectional variability. We propose that absent or inaccurate morphology can be explained by a deficit in the mapping to PF. This supports a dissociation between syntactic representation and surface inflection.