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The acquisition of SV order in unaccusatives: manipulating the definiteness of the NP argument*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2014

MIRTA VERNICE  and
MARIA TERESA GUASTI
MIRTA VERNICE*
Affiliation:
University of Milano-Bicocca
MARIA TERESA GUASTI
Affiliation:
University of Milano-Bicocca
*
Address for correspondence: Mirta Vernice, Department of Psychology, U6 Building, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milano, Italy. tel: +39 (0)2 64483805; fax: +39 (0)2 64483706; e-mail: mirta.vernice@unimib.it
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Abstract

In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on indefinites (Belletti, 1988), we tested whether children used indefiniteness as a feature to assign the partitive case to the verb's argument. In the sentences, we manipulated whether the subject preceded or followed the (unaccusative or unergative) verb and whether the subject was expressed by means of a definite or indefinite NP. With unaccusatives, children tended to place the subject in the postverbal position when the subject NP was indefinite, whereas, when the sentence presented a definite postverbal subject, children preferred to place the definite subject in the preverbal position. Definiteness exerted an effect only with unaccusatives, suggesting that children treated unergatives and unaccusatives differently.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 210 - 237
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank Vieri Samek-Ludovici, Marianella Carminati, Luca Ducceschi, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. This work has been supported by a FIRB grant ‘La ricerca fondamentale sul linguaggio al servizio della lingua italiana: documentazione, acquisizione monolingue, bilingue e L2, e ideazione di prodotti multimediali’ (Fundamental research on language in the service of the Italian language: documentation, monolingual, bilingual and L2 acquisition, and the conception of multimedia products) – FIRB Project (2008).

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