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The acquisition of infinitival complements to causative verbs in Mozambican Portuguese

  • Anabela Gonçalves , Ana Lúcia Santos , Inês Duarte and Víctor Justino
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Complement Clauses in Portuguese
This chapter is in the book Complement Clauses in Portuguese

Abstract

This chapter aims at analyzing the acquisition of complements to causative verbs in Mozambican Portuguese (MozP) as L1 by pre-school children. By presenting the results of a completion task (Santos, Gonçalves, & Hyams, 2016), we show that Mozambican children, like Portuguese ones, take propositional complements as complete functional domains, which explains the high occurrence of inflected infinitives. However, MozP presents an innovative pattern in which the causative verb selects for a complement with the structure [DP XP]. We claim that this complement corresponds to a pseudo-relative, a structure which is severely constrained in Portuguese.

Abstract

This chapter aims at analyzing the acquisition of complements to causative verbs in Mozambican Portuguese (MozP) as L1 by pre-school children. By presenting the results of a completion task (Santos, Gonçalves, & Hyams, 2016), we show that Mozambican children, like Portuguese ones, take propositional complements as complete functional domains, which explains the high occurrence of inflected infinitives. However, MozP presents an innovative pattern in which the causative verb selects for a complement with the structure [DP XP]. We claim that this complement corresponds to a pseudo-relative, a structure which is severely constrained in Portuguese.

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