Anna Gavarró
about my work: http://filcat.uab.cat/clt/Gavarro/gavarro.html/Welcome.html
and my research group: http://www.imxprs.com/free/apl/apl-website
Address: Departament de Filologia Catalana
Edifici B
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Bellaterra 08193
and my research group: http://www.imxprs.com/free/apl/apl-website
Address: Departament de Filologia Catalana
Edifici B
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Bellaterra 08193
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Papers by Anna Gavarró
A cross-linguistic study of French and Catalan
Anna Gavarró, Stephanie Durrleman and Hélène Delage
(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Université de Genève)
The behaviour of pronominal clitics in Romance has been shown to relate to person features
in adult grammar (see for example Manzini and Savoia, 2005 for many Italian varieties). Yet
most approaches to clitic production in child acquisition disregard this so-called person split.
In this study we report results for first and second person clitic production in early French and
Catalan, and evaluate two types of hypotheses that have been put forward to account for clitic
acquisition. On the one hand, various authors predict relatively good performance across
languages for 1st and 2nd person clitics. More specifically, these clitics are considered
computationally easier than 3rd person clitics because they do not trigger syntactic
intervention effects (Coene and Avram, 2011) or do not display morphological gender
marking (Tuller et al., 2011; Delage and Durrleman, 2013). On the other hand, under another
approach (the Unique Checking Constraint account of clitic omission, see Gavarró, Torrens
and Wexler, 2010) performance will be selectively good in those languages which require the
elimination of only one uninterpretable feature in the derivation of a clitic construction, and
worse in languages where two (or more) uninterpretable features must be eliminated.
According to Gavarró et al., a clitic derivation which does not involve participle agreement,
as is the case for Catalan 1st/2nd clitics (1), only entails elimination of one uninterpretable
feature (at ClP) and thus no clitic omission should emerge in early production (2). In contrast,
clitics which trigger participle agreement involve a derivation including two instances of
feature elimination (at both vP and ClP), as is the case for French 1st/2nd clitics, thus the UCC
predicts early clitic omission because of the higher computational load associated with this
more complex, language-specific operation (3–4).
A total of 47 French-speaking children of ages 3 to 5 years took part in an elicitation task
following the method of Silva (2008) as modified in Gavarró and Fortón (2014). Their
performance was compared to that of 44 Catalan-speaking children within the age range of 2
to 4, tested with the same materials (from Gavarró and Fortón, 2014). Each child was tested
on four 1st person and four 2nd person clitics, all singular items. The results for French are
given in Table 1, and they attest to a period of 1st /2nd person clitic omission; rates of
production do not statistically differ (respectively 28.2 % for 1st person and 28.7% for 2nd
person for all 47 children). Even if performance consistently increases with age (with a rate of
production of clitics of 4.5% at age 3, 29.5% at age 4 and 50% at age 5), the inter-group
differences are significant only between the 3- and the 4-year-olds (p <.05). (The absence of a
difference between the 4- and the 5-year-olds can be attributed to the very high inter-subject
variability in children’s performance, with production rates varying between 0 and 100% both
at age 4 and 5.) These findings contrast with the results reported in Table 2 (see also Gavarró
and Fortón, 2014), with very low levels of omission for Catalan 1st / 2nd person clitics,
although as in French there is no difference between 1st and 2nd person. Furthermore, the cases
of omission in Catalan are confined to non-finite verbs, more likely to be interpreted
generically, while this pattern is absent in French. We conclude that there is evidence for
cross-linguistic variation in the development of this clitic type, contrary to the claims that
1st/2nd person clitics are universally an early acquisition. We ascribe the different performance
of Catalan and French children to differences in participle agreement between the two
languages, in line with the UCC. Still, the effects of the UCC, a maturational constraint, are
argued to last until age 3, but here clitic omission in French is attested until age 5. This
seriously questions the UCC analysis as the unique explanation for clitic omission in French.
(1) [ClP pro Cl [TP T [vP v [VP V pro]]]]
(2) M’ha pintat/*pintada.
CL1s has painted.ms/painted.fs
‘S/he has painted me.’
(3) [ClP pro Cl [TP T [vP pro v [VP V pro]]]]
(4) Il m’a peinte/?peint.
he CL1s has painted.fs/painted.ms
‘He has painted me.’
Table 1: Clitic production and omission in French
1st person 2nd person 1st and 2nd person other
and noanswers
production omission production omission clitic
production
clitic
omission
3-y.o. 0 43.2% 9.1% 43.2% 4.5% 43.2% 52.3%
4-y.o. 31% 41% 28% 50% 29.5% 45.5% 25%
5-y.o. 50% 47.7% 50% 47.7% 50% 47.7% 2.3%
Table 2: Clitic production and omission in Catalan
1st person 2nd person 1st and 2nd person other
and noanswers
production omission production omission clitic
production
clitic
omission
2-y.o. 60.9% 15.6% 67.2% 15.6% 64.1% 15.6% 20.3%
3-y.o. 68.4% 23.7% 69.7% 19.7% 69.1% 21.7% 9.2%
4-y.o. 91.7% 8.3% 97.2% 2.8% 94.4% 5.5% 0
adults 100% 0 100% 0 100% 0% 0
Selected references
Coene, M. & Avram, L. (2011). An asymmetry in the acquisition of Accusative clitics in
child Romanian. Studies on language acquisition, 43, 39-68.
Delage, Hélène & Stéphanie Durrleman (2013) Explaining the complexity of 3rd person
accusative clitics in the acquisition of French. Paper presented at Going Romance 2013,
Amsterdam.
Gavarró, Anna & Noemí Fortón (2014) Person features and the acquisition of clitics. In
Contemori, C. & L. Dal Pozzo (eds.) Inquiries into Linguistic Theory and Language
Acquisition. Papers Offered to Adriana Belletti, Siena, CISCL Press.
Manzini, Rita & Leonardo Maria Savoia (2005) I dialetti italiani e romanci. Morfosintassi
generativa, Volume II, Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria.
Tuller, L., Delage, H., Monjauze, C., Piller, A. G. & Barthez. M. A. (2011). Clitic pronoun
production as a measure of atypical language development in French. Lingua, 121, 423-
441.