The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages: (41 Language Acquisition and Language Disorders)

This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first and second language acquisition in terms of maturation of general principles universal to all languages. They all depart from the view that language acquisition can be explained in terms of learning language specific rules, constraints or structures. The different parts into which this volume is organized reflect different approaches that current research has offered, which deal with issues of development of reflexive pronouns, determiners, clitics, verbs, auxiliaries, inflection, wh-movement, ressumptive pronouns, topic and focus, mood, the syntax/discourse interface, and null arguments.

Table of Contents:
1. The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages (by Torrens, Vincent); 2. The production of SE and SELF anaphors in Spanish and Dutch children (by Baauw, Sergio); 3. On the acquisition of ambiguous Valency-Marking Morphemes: Insights from the acquisition of French SE (by Barriere, Isabelle); 4. Definite and bare noun contrasts in child Catalan (by Gavarro, Anna); 5. Null arguments in monolingual children: A comparison of Italian and French (by Muller, Natascha); 6. Prenominal elements in French-Germanic bilingual first language acquisition: Evidence for cross-linguistic influence (by Pannemann, Maren); 7. A cross-sectional study on the use of "be" in early Italian (by Caprin, Claudia); 8. Patterns of copula omission in Italian child language (by Franchi, Elisa); 9. Looking for the universal core of the RI stage (by Salustri, Manola); 10. The acquisition of experiencers in Spanish L1 and the external argument requirement hypothesis (by Torrens, Vincent); 11. Early operators and late topic-drop/pro-drop (by Kampen, Jacqueline van); 12. The acquisition of A- and A'-bound pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese (by Grolla, Elaine); 13. Acquiring long-distance wh-questions in L1 Spanish: A longitudinal investigation (by Gutierrez Mangado, Maria Junkal); 14. Evidence from L1 acquisition for the syntax of wh-scope marking in French * (by Oiry, Magda); 15. Acquisition of focus marking in European Portuguese: Evidence for a unified approach to focus (by Costa, Joao); 16. Subject pronouns in bilinguals: Interference or maturation? (by Pinto, Manuela); 17. Is the semantics/syntax interface vulnerable in l2 acquisition?: Focus on mood distinctions clauses in L2 Spanish (by Borgonovo, Claudia); 18. The development of the syntax-information structure interface: Greek learners of Spanish (by Lozano, Cristobal); 19. Beyond the syntax of the Null Subject Parameter: A look at the discourse-pragmatic distribution of null and overt subjects by L2 learners of Spanish (by Montrul, Silvina A.); 20. Index