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The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics

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The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics THE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH MORPHOSYNTAX STUDIES IN THEORETICAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS VOLUME 31 Managing Editors Lyn Frazier, Dept. of Linguistics, University ofMassachusetts at Amherst Thomas Roeper, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Kenneth Wexler, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Editorial Board Robert Berwick, Artijicialintelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Manfred Bierwisch, Zentralinstitutfiir Sprachwissenschaft, Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin Merrill Garrett, University ofArizona, Tucson Lila Gleitman, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Mary-Louise Kean, University of California, Irvine Howard Lasnik, University of Connecticut at Storrs John Marshall, Neuropsychology Unit, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford Daniel Osherson, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Yukio Otsu, Keio University, Tokyo Edwin Williams, Princeton University The titles published in this series are listed al the end ofthis volume. THE ACQUISITION OFSPANISH MORPHOSYNTAX The L IIL2 Connection Edited by ANA TERESA PEREZ-LEROUX University of Toronto Canada and JUANA MUNOZ LICERAS University of Ottawa Canada Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. A c.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-4020-0975-4 ISBN 978-94-010-0291-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-010-0291-2 Printed an acid-free paper AU Rights Reserved © 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originaily published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a comnuter svstem. for exclusive use bv the nurchaser of the work. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii ANA T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND JUANA M. LICERAS ix Introduction: The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax. AURORA BEL Early Verbs and the Acquisition ofthe Tense Feature in Spanish and Catalan. MARIA JOSE EZEIZABARRENA 35 Root Infinitives in Two Pro-Drop Languages. HANAKO FUJINO AND TETSUYA SANO 67 Aspects ofthe Null Object Phenomenon in Child Spanish. LILIANA SANCHEZ 89 Spell-out Conditions for Interpretable Features in Ll and L2/Bilingual Spanish. SILVINA MONTRUL AND ROUMYANA SLABAKOVA 115 The L2 Acquisition ofMorphosyntactic and Semantic Properties ofthe Aspectual Tenses Preterite and Imperfect. JOYCE BRUHN DE GARAVITO AND LYDIA WHITE 153 The L2 Acquisition ofSpanish DPs: the Status ofGrammatical Features. ANA T. PEREZ-LEROUX, ERIN O'ROURKE, GILLIAN LORD AND BEATRIZ CENTENO-CORTES 179 Inalienable Possession in Spanish: L2-Acquisition at the Lexicon-Syntax Interface. JUANA M. LICERAS, LOURDES DIAZ AND TERHI SALOMAA-ROBERTSON 209 The Compounding Parameter and the Word Marker Hypothesis: Accounting for the Acquisition ofSpanish N-N Compounding. Author Index 239 Index 243 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We owe special thanks to Tom Roeper and Ken Wexler, for their support in the conception and eventual publication of this volume. We also thank Jacqueline Bergsma, Iris Klug, Susan Jones and Vanessa Nijweide, at the Kluwer offices, for their friendly and generous editorial assistance; to Tamara Alkasey and Michaela Pirvulescu, who provided invaluable assistance with other editorial matters, and two anonymous reviewers at Kluwer, for their valuable insight, and for sharing our sense that this kind of work is needed. Completion of this volume was possible with a grant from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University ofToronto to A. T. Perez-Leroux. VB ANA T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND JUANA M. LICERAS INTRODUCTION The acquisition ofSpanish morphosyntax 1. RATIONALE AND CONTENTS OF THE VOLUME This volume evolved from the need to share with colleagues and students in the fields of psycholinguistic and linguistic theory, and with colleagues working in related disciplines, some recent developments in the exploration of the central questions regarding language acquisition, as addressed with Spanish data. While we understand that questions about the language faculty should mainly be addressed by comparative research, at times it is pertinent to focus on a given language. The sociological motivation in this case lies in the recent expansion in the number of scholars and the amount of resources now devoted to the formal study of the Spanish language in general, and of the acquisition of Spanish in particular. The scholarly motivation parallels the sociological: as more aspects of the syntactic structure of Spanish are better characterized, the easier it becomes to make explicit descriptions ofthe developmental patterns, and to understand the relevance of such phenomena to linguistic theory. A given language, such as Spanish, can provide very important tests ofspecific hypotheses. This book presents a collection of research articles exploring two central issues of language acquisition research: the problem of how learners acquire knowledge of language that extends beyond the input, and the problem of how grammar develops over time and why intermediate grammars take the form they do. Via the analysis of data from child and adult acquisition of Spanish, the various papers included here deal with the issue of how language data that at times differs from the target grammar (that ofthe adult, native speaker of Spanish) is represented in the mind of the learners. Specifically, these papers explore the issue of optionality in developing grammars and the triggering relationship between morphology and syntactic knowledge. ix A.T. Perez-Leroux and J. Munoz Liceras (eds.). The Acquisition ofSpanish Morphosyntax. ix-xxiii. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. x A.T. PEREZ-LEROUX AND J.M. LICERAS The various chapters are framed within current generative approaches to linguistic theory (Chomsky 1981, 1993, 1995; Kayne 1994; Halle and Marantz 1993). According to this theory, language acquisition takes place via the implementation ofthe innate principles and the setting ofthe parameters of Universal Grammar (the linguistic biological endowment which characterizes the human species) upon exposure to language particular input. While innate principles are realized in all languages, parameters account for language variation and are fixed via the triggering effect provided by the linguistic environment. Chomsky's Principles and Parameters theory, and therefore, the notion ofparameters, entered the cognitive arena at the onset of the 80's with the publication of Lectures on Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981). The specific theory of language acquisition proposed there-though very programmatic- contained the ingredients needed to set up a very active research program. The explorations of these questions took place in separate, if often parallel roads in the study of child and adult language!. In her work on early null subjects, Hyams (1986) set out a comprehensive program for exploring the parameter-setting model in acquisition. Most research aimed at the crosslinguistic comparison of a wide range ofgrammatical phenomena (wh-movement, binding theory, emergence of functional projections, etc.) sought primarily to defme a) how principles constrain intermediate grammars, and b) what are the triggers that lead learners to set the parameters of the target language. In the area of second language acquisition, this program examined how L2 learners confront input data to construct a new grammar (Flynn 1983, 1987; White 1986, 1989; Liceras 1983, 1986). This program had three distinct characteristics that made it a radical departure from previous explorations. First, its biological roots-the linguistic capacity is understood as a mental organ which "grows" via exposure to the linguistic input provided by the environment (any given natural language)-provide an interesting point of departure for the study of non-native acquisition as a special case of primary language acquisition. Second, its psychological roots-the modular view of the mind and consequently of the linguistic capacity-address both the issue of the actual grammatical representations which are acquired as well as the issue of the learning and processing mechanisms which explain how learning takes place. Third, its comprehensive and formal model of grammar, with the search for an explanation of universality and parametric variation as its central goals, provides the categories needed to compare all languages, including non­ native grammars. These fundamental goals remain in Chomsky's Minimalist Program, but the tension between principles and parametric variation is radically redefmed. In minimalist terms, the language faculty consists of a computational system that generates representations that must be well-formed and interpretable at INTRODUCTION Xl the two levels which interface with external systems: phonetic form and logical form. Parametrization, meaning the range of formal variation among the world's languages, is represented in the inventory of formal features of individual languages: "variation in language is essentially morphological in character" (Chomsky 1995:7). A welcome (direct or indirect) outcome ofthis view is the debate concerning the role of morphology in the model, and consequently, in language acquisition. In the minimalist spirit, the essays included here frame developmental issues primarily in terms of whether and how formal features are selected
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