First Language Acquisition in Spanish: A Minimalist Approach to Nominal Agreement (Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)

241 Pages·2011·0.79 MB·English

by  Gilda Socarrás

First Language Acquisition in Spanish
Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics
Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics publishes work at the forefront
of present-day developments in the fi eld. The series is open to studies
from all branches of theoretical linguistics and to the full range of
theoretical frameworks. Titles in the series present original research that
makes a new and signifi cant contribution and are aimed primarily at
scholars in the fi eld, but are clear and accessible, making them useful also
to students, to new researchers and to scholars in related disciplines.
Series Editor: Siobhan Chapman, Reader in English, University of
Liverpool, UK.
Other titles in the series:
Syntax in Functional Grammar, G. David Morley
Agreement, Pronominal Clitics and Negation in Tamazight Berber, Hamid Ouali
Deviational Syntactic Structures, Hans Götzsche
A Neural Network Model of Lexical Organisation, Michael Fortescue
The Syntax and Semantics of Discourse Markers, Miriam Urgelles-Coll
First Language Acquisition
in Spanish
A Minimalist Approach to
Nominal Agreement
Gilda M. Socarrás
Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Gilda M. Socarrás 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-90307
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain
To children who hold all the answers
if we are willing to wait

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Chapter 1 Theoretical Foundations 1
Chapter 2 Experimental Methodology 9
Chapter 3 Gender Agreement 27
Chapter 4 Number Agreement 94
Chapter 5 Emergence of Determiner Phrases 151
Chapter 6 Conclusions 176
Appendices 186
Notes 207
Bibliography 214
Index 221

Preface
The aim of this monograph is to present a cross-sectional experimental
approach to the study of nominal agreement in Spanish child language
with the purpose of complementing previous studies on this subject and in
some instances fi lling the gaps left by them. In particular, this monograph
focuses on the acquisition of gender (feminine/masculine) and number
(singular/plural) agreement by three monolingual Spanish-speaking chil-
dren under the age of three. The majority of studies on the acquisition of
Spanish as a fi rst language are written in the context of the parametric
approach, but I have chosen to adopt the framework of the Minimalist
Program (MP) (Chomsky 1995, 2001) for two major reasons. First, the MP
offers an elegant analysis of the acquisition of nominal agreement based on
a process of matching or checking features (see Chapter 1). Second, it is
hoped that the use of this approach will advance the research on Spanish
acquisition to the theoretical developments of the past 15 years. Nonethe-
less, the adoption of a new paradigm is not without its challenges, as will be
discussed in the remainder of the book.
The present monograph addresses formal aspects such as the availability
of functional categories in child language, a vital component in the feature
checking or matching process within the MP, as well as issues pertaining to
the acquisition process, for example, how gender and number features
are acquired. In particular, it explores whether children are able to estab-
lish target-like agreement relations between nominals and their determin-
ers (i.e., grammatical agreement), as well as agreement with respect to
the actual utterance referent (i.e., semantic agreement), as illustrated in
Example 1.
Example 1
(a) La casa linda (Referent ‘one house’)
‘The (fem/sg) house (fem/sg) pretty (fem/sg)’
(b) *La casa linda (Referent ‘two houses’)