In:Complement Clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and acquisition
Edited by Ana Lúcia Santos and Anabela Gonçalves
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 17] 2018
► pp. 295–320
The acquisition of infinitival complements to causative verbs in Mozambican Portuguese
Published online: 16 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.17.10gon
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.17.10gon
This chapter aims at analyzing the acquisition of complements to causative verbs in Mozambican Portuguese (MozP) as L1 by pre-school children. By presenting the results of a completion task (Santos, Gonçalves, & Hyams, 2016), we show that Mozambican children, like Portuguese ones, take propositional complements as complete functional domains, which explains the high occurrence of inflected infinitives. However, MozP presents an innovative pattern in which the causative verb selects for a complement with the structure [DP XP]. We claim that this complement corresponds to a pseudo-relative, a structure which is severely constrained in Portuguese.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Complements to causative verbs in Portuguese
- 3.Acquisition of Portuguese causative verbs: Facts and questions
- 3.1Previous work on European Portuguese
- 3.2Causative verbs in (the acquisition of) Mozambican Portuguese: Research questions
- 4.Methodology
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Final remarks
Acknowledgements Notes References
References (44)
Barbosa, P., & Cochofel, F. (2005). A Construção de Infinitivo Preposicionado em PE. In I. Duarte & I. Leiria (Eds.), Actas do XX Encontro Nacional da APL (pp. 387–400). Lisboa: APL.
Becker, M. (2005). Raising, control and the subset principle. In J. Alderete, C. Han, & A. Kochetov (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 52–60). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Brito, A. M. (1995). Sobre algumas construções pseudorelativas em Português. Revista da Faculdade de Letras “Línguas e Literaturas”, XII, 25–54.
Casalicchio, J. (2011). Le frase gerundive e infinitive come alternativa alla pseudorelative in alcune varietà romanze (Unpublished manuscript). Università degli Studi di Padova.
(2013). The role of verb movement in the analysis of predicative gerunds and prepositional infinitives. Paper presented at
International Workshop of
The Syntactic Variation of Catalan and Spanish Dialects
. Barcelona, June 2013.
Chimbutane, F. (2012). Panorama linguístico de Moçambique: Análise dos dados do III Recenseamento Geral da População e Habitação de 2007. Maputo: Instituto Nacional de Estatística.
(2008). On phases. In R. Freidin, C. P. Otero, & M. L. Zubizarreta (Eds.), Foundational issues in linguistic theory (pp. 133–166). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Cinque, G. (1992). The pseudo-relative and Acc-ing construction after verbs of perception.
CLI-91.I.2 Working Papers in Linguistics
. University of Venice.
Costa, J., Fernandes, B., Vaz, S., & Grillo, N. (2016). (Pseudo-)Relatives and prepositional infinitival constructions in the acquisition of European Portuguese. Probus, 28(1), 119–143.
Duarte, I. (1993). Complementos infinitivos preposicionados e outras construções temporalmente defectivas em Português europeu.
Actas do VIII Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística
, 145–158. Lisboa: APL.
Duarte, I., Gonçalves, A., Miguel, M., & Mota, M. A. (1999). ‘Não cheguei de aprender nada’: Áreas de variação e tendências de mudança em Português de Moçambique.
Actas do XIV Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística
(Vol. 1, pp. 477–493). Braga: APL.
Duarte, I., Santos, A. L., & Alexandre, N. (2015). How relative are relative purpose clauses? Probus, 27(2), 237–270.
Fernandes, B. (2012). O estatuto das pseudo-relativas em português europeu (Unpublished MA dissertation). FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Firmino, G. (2002). A questão linguística na África pós-colonial: O caso do português e das línguas autóctones em Moçambique. Maputo: Promédia.
Gonçalves, A. (2003). Defectividade funcional e predicados complexos em estruturas de Controlo do português. In I. Castro & I. Duarte (Eds.), Razões e emoção: Miscelânea de estudos em homenagem a Maria Helena Mateus (Vol. 1, pp. 347–366). Lisboa: IN-CM.
Gonçalves, P. (2001). Panorama geral do PM. Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 79(3), 977–990.
(2013). O português em África. In E. Raposo, M. F. Bacelar do Nascimento, M. A. Mota, L. Segura, & A. Mendes (Eds.), Gramática do português (pp. 157–178). Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
Gonçalves, P., & Maciel, C. (1998). Estruturas de subordinação na aquisição do português/língua segunda. In P. Gonçalves (Ed.), Mudanças do português em Moçambique: Aquisição e formato de estruturas de subordinação (pp. 15–66). Maputo: UEM, Livraria Universitária.
Gonçalves, P., & Vicente, F. (s/d). Bibliografia sobre o português de Moçambique (a partir de 1964). <[URL]> Last update – January 2017 (Retrieved November 2017).
Grillo, N., & Costa, J. (2014). A novel argument for the universality of parsing principles. Cognition, 133, 156–187.
Guasti, M. T. (1988). La pseudorelative et les phènomènes d’accord. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, 13, 35–57.
Hernanz, M. L. (1999). El infinitivo. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (pp. 2197–2356). Madrid: Espasa.
Hirsch, C., Orfitelli, R., & Wexler, K. (2007). When seem means think: The role of the experiencer-phrase in children’s comprehension of raising. In A. Belikova, L. Meroni, & M. Umeda (Eds.), Galana 2 –Proceedings of the conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America 2. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
(2008). The acquisition of raising reconsidered. In A. Gavarró & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (pp. 253–262). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Hirsch, C., & Wexler, K. (2007). The late acquisition of raising: What children seem to think about seem. In W. Davies & S. Dubinsky (Eds.), New horizons in the analysis of control and raising (pp. 35–70). Dordrecht: Springer.
Issak, A. (1998). Estruturas de complementação verbal do Português de Moçambique. In P. Gonçalves (Ed.), Mudanças do português em Moçambique: Aquisição e formato de estruturas de subordinação (pp. 67–110). Maputo: UEM, Livraria Universitária.
Kirby, S. (2011). Move over, control freaks: Syntactic raising as a cognitive default. In N. Denis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (Eds.), Boston University Conference on Language Development 35 – Online proceedings supplement.
Lasnik, H., & Saito, M. (1991). On the subject of infinitives. In L. M. Dobrin, L. Nichols, & R. R. Rodriguez (Eds.), CLS 27 – Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society 27 (pp. 324–343). Chicago, IL: CLS.
Orfitelli, R. (2012a). ‘Experiencing’ a slight delay: Intervening arguments and the acquisition of subject-to-subject raising. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 374–386). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
(2012b). Argument intervention in the acquisition of A-movement (Unpublished PhD dissertation). UCLA.
Pérez-Leroux, A., Pirvulescu, M., & Roberge, Y. (2008). Null objects in child language: Syntax and the lexicon. Lingua, 118, 370–398.
Radford, A. (1975). Pseudorelatives and the unity of subject raising. Archivum Linguisticum, 6, 32–64.
Raposo, E. (1989). Prepositional infinitival constructions in European Portuguese. In O. Jaeggli & K. Safir (Eds.), The null subject parameter (pp. 277–305). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Rizzi, L. (2000). Direct perception, government and thematic sharing. In L. Rizzi (Ed.), Comparative syntax and language acquisition (pp. 203–227). London: Routledge.
Rothman, J., Duarte, I., Pires, A., & Santos, A. L. (2013). How early after all? Inflected infinitives in European and Brazilian Portuguese L1 production. In S. Stavrakaki, M. Lalioti, & P. Konstatinopoulou (Eds.), Advances in language acquisition (pp. 164–172). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Santos, A. L., Gonçalves, A., & Hyams, N. (2016). Aspects of the acquisition of object control and ECM-type verbs in European Portuguese. Language Acquisition, 23(3), 199–233.
Santos, A. L., Rothman, J., Pires, A., & Duarte, I. (2013). Early or late acquisition of inflected infinitives in European Portuguese?: Evidence from spontaneous production data. In M. Becker, J. Grinstead, & J. Rothman (Eds.), Generative linguistics and acquisition: Studies in honor of Nina M. Hyams (pp. 65–88). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.