TY  - JOUR
A1  - Flores, Cristina
A1  - Rinke, Esther
A1  - Sopata, Aldona
T1  - Acquiring the distribution of null and overt direct objects in European Portuguese
T2  - Journal of Portuguese linguistics
N2  - This article investigates the L1 acquisition of different types of direct objects in European Portuguese (EP). Previous research has revealed that although children have early syntactic and pragmatic knowledge of objects across languages, the adequate use of pronouns and null objects is protracted in the acquisition of EP (Costa et al. 2012). The present study shows that children acquiring the distribution of direct objects are aware of universal pragmatic hierarchies but struggle with the interpretation and feature bundles of null objects. Assuming that arguments are linked to left-peripheral C/edge linkers (Sigurðsson 2011), we argue that children need more time to discover the adult-like feature composition of null objects in EP because they involve phi-silent features. Relative accessibility (Ariel 1991) is universal and available early, whereas the absolute accessibility of null objects, i.e. their feature content, is acquired relatively late.
KW  - European Portuguese
KW  - direct objects
KW  - accessibility hierarchy
KW  - animacy
KW  - null object stage
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/54963
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-549631
SN  - 2397-5563
SN  - 1645-4537
N1  - Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
VL  - 19
IS  - 1, Art. 5
SP  - 1
EP  - 20
PB  - Ubiquity Press
CY  - London
ER  -