Minimalist Inquiries into Child and Adult Language Acquisition ≥ Studies on Language Acquisition 35 Editor Peter Jordens Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York Minimalist Inquiries into Child and Adult Language Acquisition Case Studies across Portuguese Edited by Acrisio Pires Jason Rothman Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York MoutondeGruyter(formerlyMouton,TheHague) isaDivisionofWalterdeGruyterGmbH&Co.KG,Berlin. (cid:2)(cid:2) Printedonacid-freepaperwhichfallswithintheguidelines oftheANSItoensurepermanenceanddurability. LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Minimalistinquiriesintochildandadultlanguageacquisition:casestud- iesacrossPortuguese/editedbyAcrisioPires,JasonRothman. p.cm.(cid:2)(Studiesonlanguageacquisition;35) Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex. ISBN978-3-11-021534-2(alk.paper) 1. Second language acquisition (cid:2) Case studies. 2. Bilingualism (cid:2) Case studies. 3. Portuguese language (cid:2) Acquisition (cid:2) Case studies. 4.Portugueselanguage(cid:2)Abilitytesting(cid:2)Casestudies. 5.Linguistic change(cid:2)Casestudies. 6.Grammar,Comparativeandgeneral(cid:2)Case studies. 7. Minimalist theory (Linguistics) I. Pires, Acrisio. II.Rothman,Jason. P118.2.M57 2009 4011.93(cid:2)dc22 2009018007 BibliographicinformationpublishedbytheDeutscheNationalbibliothek TheDeutscheNationalbibliothekliststhispublicationintheDeutscheNationalbibliografie; detailedbibliographicdataareavailableintheInternetathttp://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-11-021534-2 ISSN 1861-4248 (cid:2) Copyright2009byWalterdeGruyterGmbH&Co.KG,D-10785Berlin. Allrightsreserved,includingthoseoftranslationintoforeignlanguages.Nopartofthisbook maybereproducedinanyformorbyanymeans,electronicormechanical,includingphotocopy, recording,oranyinformationstorageandretrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwritingfrom thepublisher. Coverdesign:SigurdWendland,Berlin. PrintedinGermany. Acknowledgments We are very grateful to all the contributors for sharing their original re- search as part of this volume. We are especially thankful to David Lighfoot and Carlos Quicoli for their enthusiasm with this project, with our work in general, and for agreeing to write the foreword and afterword respectively. Acrisio Pires thanks his colleagues at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan for their encouragement and support of this project, especially Sam Epstein, Sally Thomason, Pam Beddor, Marlyse Baptista, Deborah Keller-Cohen and Robin Queen. He also thanks the Of- fice of the Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs, and the Dean’s Office at the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the Uni- versity of Michigan for financial support to research related to this book. Jason Rothman is especially grateful to the Obermann Center of Ad- vanced Studies, the Dean’s office at the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa for generous financial and moral support in the course of this project. Addi- tionally, he thanks his colleagues at Iowa for their support and guidance, especially Tom Lewis, Roumyana Slabakova, Paula Kempchinsky and Mercedes Niño-Murcia. We both acknowledge all the help we received from our research assis- tants, especially Lauren Reynolds, Jeff Renaud, Christopher Becker and David Medeiros, who spent many days proofreading, indexing and doing extensive computer editing and format checking on the final chapter manu- scripts in order to bring this book to its publication format. We are especially thankful to Peter Jordens, the SOLA series editor, for his early and continued interest in making this collection possible. In addi- tion, we thank the editorial team at Mouton DeGruyter, in particular Ursula Kleinhenz, for giving us all the flexibility we needed to successfully com- plete the editorial work on this volume. We thank various colleagues, including Charlotte Galves, Elaine Grolla, Mary Kato and Miriam Lemle, for helping us identify potential contributors for this volume at the planning stage. Finally, we especially thank the following colleagues who served as peer-reviewers for all the individual paper submissions we received, and whose expertise and gracious help ensured the quality of the chapters that were ultimately selected for inclusion in the volume: vi Acknowledgments Dalila Ayoun (University of Arizona) Camilla Bardel (University of Stockholm) Joyce Bruhn de Garavito (University of Western Ontario) José Camacho (Rutgers University) Marcela Cazzoli-Goeta (University of Durham) Alejandro Cuza (University of Illinois at Chicago) Sonia Frota (University of Lisbon) Alison Gabriele (Kansas University) Ana Gavarró (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) Elena Gavruseva (University of Iowa) Ana Gouvea (Florida International University) Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes (Plymouth University) John Grinstead (The Ohio State University) Cornelia Hamann (Carl von Ossietzky University) Julia Herschensohn (University of Washington) Kazuko Hiramatsu (University of Michigan, Flint) Tania Ionin (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Nina Kazanina (University of Bristol) Elsi Kaiser (USC) Paula Kempchinsky (University of Iowa) Ingrid Leung (University of Hong Kong) Lisa Levinson (Oakland University) Cristóbal Lozano (University of Granada) Ana Maria Martins (University of Lisbon) Jairo Nunes (University of São Paulo) Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (University of Toronto) Heloisa Salles (University of Brasilia) Liliana Sánchez (Rutgers University) Ludovica Serratrice (Manchester University) Andrea Stiasny (University of Michigan) Rosalind Thornton (Macquarie University) Sharon Unsworth (Utretch University) Elena Valenzuela (Western Ontario University) Maria Luisa Zubizarreta (USC) Last but not the least, we thank our families and friends for their conti- nuous support and care, especially when the work on this project made us even busier than we normally are. Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman Contents Acknowledgements v Foreword 1 David Lightfoot Introduction Child and adult language acquisition, linguistic theory 5 and (microparametric) variation Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman Part 1 – First Language Acquisition Bootstrapping language acquisition from a minimalist standpoint: On the identification of ϕ-features in Brazilian Portuguese 35 Letícia Sicuro Corrêa Clitic omission in the acquisition of European Portuguese: Data from comprehension 63 João Costa and Maria Lobo Speculations about the acquisition of wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese 85 Elaine Grolla Aspect and the acquisition of null objects in Brazilian Portuguese 105 Ruth Vasconcellos Lopes Acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese in late childhood: Implications for syntactic theory and language change 129 Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman viii Contents Early VP ellipsis: Production and comprehension evidence 155 Ana Lúcia Santos Part 2 – Adult and Second Language Acquisition Informing adult acquisition debates: N-Drop at the initial state of L3 Brazilian Portuguese 177 Jennifer Cabrelli-Amaro, Michael Iverson and Tiffany Judy Divergence at the syntax-discourse interface: Evidence from the L2 acquisition of contrastive focus in European Portuguese 197 Maria Fruit Bell Competing SLA hypotheses assessed: Comparing heritage and successive Spanish bilinguals of L3 Brazilian Portuguese 221 Michael Iverson Brazilian Portuguese and the recovery of lost clitics through schooling 245 Mary A. Kato, Sonia L. Cyrino and Vilma Reche Corrêa The acquisition of clitic pronouns in L2 European Portuguese 273 Ana Maria Madeira and Maria Francisca Xavier Subject expression in the non-native acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese 301 Silvina Montrul, Rejane Dias and Ana Thomé-Williams Afterword 327 A. Carlos Quicoli List of contributors 341 Author index 343 Subject index 351 Foreword David Lightfoot Over the last generation, we have seen the emergence of an international community of scientists investigating various forms of Portuguese. This community is rooted for the most part in Brazil and Portugal but involves people from many countries, including many talented Brazilians who have pursued graduate degrees in the US. The investigations have focused on the many varieties of Portuguese spoken both in Portugal and Brazil at the present time and in previous generations, examining the ways in which the languages spoken in each country have come to diverge more and more over the last few hundred years. The differences include morphological properties that seem to have syntactic consequences, and there has been a lot of productive, theoretically engaged work aiming to understand and ex- plain the way that phenomena cluster in the many various forms of Portu- guese under investigation, particularly morphological phenomena co- occurring with certain syntactic constructions. This work has brought together sociolinguists, theoreticians and special- ists in language acquisition and historical change. The work has focused on the macro variation between the families of languages on each side of the Atlantic and the micro variation between forms within each family. I know of nothing quite like this for any other language. The theoretical interest of this work is enormous. For each descriptive statement in each I-language, there needs to be an explanation. Following what has become the usual explanatory schema in the field, an explanation requires an account of the acquisition of that property. The properties, of course, are stated abstractly, elements of an individual I-language or “grammar,” and the descriptive challenge is to find the right statement of the property in such a way that the relevant phenomena cluster correctly. The explanatory challenge is to specify exactly what in a child’s experience might trigger the emergence of that particular property. So we now have a rich cornucopia of data and analyses, and the theoret- ical import of this work is of great interest to linguists working on other language systems. Linguists of many stripes will find much to work with in the collection of papers that Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman have put to-