The clausal left periphery in child Spanish and German

Abstract

Evidence from child language development supports the position that overt subjects in Southern Romance languages are left-peripheral, Topic-Focus constituents. Specifically, overt subjects begin to be used at the same time as other less controversially left-peripheral, Topic-Focus constituents, such as fronted objects and wh-questions. However, this interpretation of the data would be much more compelling if it could be shown that these constituents do not emerge at the same time in the speech of children learning languages in which overt subjects are obligatory and largely independent of discourse considerations, such as German. To this end, we examined the speech of three longitudinally studied Spanish-speaking children, Carlos, Eduardo and Graciela, and the speech of two longitudinally studied German-speaking children, Simone and Caroline. We also examined the German data of Katrin and Andreas, which was collected on a single day for each. While the Spanish-speaking children begin productively using overt subjects, fronted objects and wh-questions at a statistically similar point in development, the German-speaking children's data show that overt subjects begin to be used significantly earlier than do fronted elements and wh-questions. This supports the argument that child Southern Romance and child German are different with respect to the timing of the development of these constituents. We believe that this reflects the children's early knowledge of the structure of their target adult languages, which in the case of Southern Romance, includes left-peripheral, discourse-sensitive subjects.

Null Subject Occurrence in Monolingual Spanish SLI: A Discriminant Function Analysis

“…We take this to be strong confirmation of the hypothesis that left peripheral constructions in Spanish, including overt subjects, begin to be used at the same time. It is worth noting that, as pointed out above, the earliest transcripts of María, presented in Bel (2003) and Aguado-Orea and Pine (2002), include all three of these constructions, as Grinstead and Spinner (2009) claim would predict. In contrast to Spanish and Catalan, Grinstead and Spinner (2009) show that in child German, an overt subject language in which subject position, but not subject overtness, is discourse-sensitive, children begin using overt subjects significantly earlier, again by the binomial test, than they do wh-questions or fronted objects, as illustrated in Table 3.…”

“…María's MLU in words (MLUw) in her earliest file is already 1.93, substantially greater than the MLUw of the Catalan-speaking children (mean MLUw = 1.55) and the MLUw of the Spanish-speaking children (mean MLUw = 1.55) in Grinstead and Spinner (2009). More importantly, as pointed out in Grinstead and Spinner (2009), María appears to be using more grammatically sophisticated constructions than the children studied in Grinstead (2004) in that she uses verbs with past imperfect verb tense (e.g., Tenía pupa 'I had an owie', María, 1;7), wh-questions (e.g., ¿Dónde está el miau? 'Where's the kitty?…”

“…2 Besides the obvious null vs. overt subject distinction between Spanish and English, there also appears to be a difference in the syntactic nature of their overt subjects. The account of the No Overt Subject Stage presented in Grinstead (2004) and Grinstead and Spinner (2009) claims, following Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (1998) and Ordóñez and Treviño (1999), that overt subjects in Spanish may be housed in the part of the clause that is closely associated with verb finiteness, as in English, but that they primarily occur with other syntactically optional constituents, higher up in the structure, in the "left periphery" in Rizzi (1997) terms. This region of the clause is argued to house other discourse-sensitive constituents including wh-elements in wh-questions and fronted objects in focus and topicalization structures.…”

“…The stage is evident if researchers pay attention to aspects of children's grammatical development, reflected in MLU values, which are the relevant measures of grammatical, and not chronological, development. See Liceras et al (2006) and Grinstead and Spinner (2009) for a fuller discussion. 2 Besides the obvious null vs. overt subject distinction between Spanish and English, there also appears to be a difference in the syntactic nature of their overt subjects.…”

“…To show that subjects, wh-questions and fronted objects 3 begin to be used at the same time, Grinstead and Spinner (2009), following Snyder and Stromswold (1997) and Snyder (2001), used the binomial test to demonstrate that there was no significant difference between the moment at which subjects began to be used and the moment when the other constructions began to be used. Table 1 reports the ages of onset of overt subjects, wh-question and fronted objects in the longitudinal study of four Catalan-speaking children and three Spanish-speaking children (compiled 1 Bel (2003) month-by-month presentation of the Catalan data of Júlia, in which she uses 7.2% overt subjects in her earliest recording, at MLUw 1.5, is much more consistent with the no-overt subject stage claim than with the claim that she is using overt subjects in adult-like proportions (38% according to Casanovas 1999 Grinstead (1998) and for Romanian in Avram and Coene (2009).…”