Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is known to license anaphoric null objects (ANO), that is, null objects with a linguistic antecedent. It also licenses VP ellipsis (VPE), with auxiliaries, modals and main verbs, the latter a case of V-stranding VPE (V-VPE), the one with which we will be concerned. Although ANOs and V-VPE may have identical surface strings in BP, we propose that they do not have the same structure. We argue that ANOs in BP are cases of DP ellipsis, and they present four properties that have been associated with (VP) ellipsis in the literature: a) availability of strict/sloppy readings (Ross, 1967.
This study focuses on the distribution of nominal elements in subject and object positions during the initial stages of the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese.The main question addressed is why children so often use null or one-word subjects, when they use multiword objects during the same developmental stage. A quantitative analysis of data produced by a Brazilian child between the ages of 1;9 and 3;3 is presented. The main idea of the paper is that the young child has incomplete knowledge of the adult agreement system. However, while offering an explanation for the behavior of subjects, a feature-based analysis does not account for the asymmetry observed in the production of subjects and objects. The proposed explanation for the asymmetry problem is based on Uriagereka's (1999) Multiple Spell-Out model, according to which Spell-out may apply more than once during the course of a derivation. Since direct objects can be branching constituents demanding a single application of Spell-out, this will be the child's favored strategy initially. On the other hand, a branching subject requires the system to spell it out prior to the rest of the derivation, driving the system into more than one application of Spell-out. This latter stage will be acquired when the child develops into the expected adult agreement system; until then, the child will be restricted to non-branching categories in subject position.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.