Early acquisition of syntactic variation: Lexical conditioning of Spanish variable clitic placement

Date

2023-12-07

Authors

Requena, Pablo E.

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Abstract

This paper examines how children acquire Spanish variable clitic placement (VCP), a lexically conditioned phenomenon whereby clitics may precede or follow complex verb phrases. Research on how children acquire truly syntactic variable phenomena suggests that they either generalize one variant initially or they match the variation in the input from the beginning. Here I examine how children acquire the lexical conditioning of Spanish VCP. A corpus study of naturalistic conversations between parents and young children suggests that from the earliest ages examined (2;0-3;0) children display lexically-specific patterns that seem to be fine-tuned by the early school years. Experimental results using two different elicitation techniques with children ages 4;0-7;0 provide further support for early acquisition of the lexical conditioning of VCP and some evidence for fine-tuning during this age window. Thus, methodological triangulation enables detection of variable use where children would otherwise show categorical use of variants with infrequent syntactic phenomena, such as Spanish VCP.

Description

Keywords

syntactic variation, child language acquisition, clitic, lexical constraint

Citation

Requena, P. E. (2023). Early acquisition of syntactic variation: Lexical conditioning of Spanish variable clitic placement. Language Variation and Change, 1–24. doi:10.1017/S0954394523000248

Department

Modern Languages and Literatures