| Title: | Subject vs. object relatives: what can Romanian children tell us about their acquisition? |
| Author: | Anamaria Benţea |
| Publication: | Revue roumaine de linguistique, LVII (2), p. 203-218 |
| p-ISSN: | 0035-3957 |
| Publisher: | Editura Academiei |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2012 |
| Abstract: | The present study addresses the question of intervention effects in subject and object relative clauses and aims at evaluating to what extent Romanian children make use of syntactic and morphological material in order to disambiguate between the two structures. The comprehension of relative clauses was tested with a sentence-scenario matching task in two experiments that manipulated the type of DP appearing as intervener in object relatives: the subject (‘the intervener’) was either a full nominal expression, or a null subject. In both cases, the phi-features of the subject matched those present on the head of the object relative clause (‘the target’). The results obtained show that Romanian children (aged 4 to 6) comprehend subject relatives better than object relatives. This suggests that children have difficulties computing structures that involve movement across an intervener whose argumental features are properly included in the set of features of the target. |
| Key words: | relative clauses, A’-movement, intervention, lexical restriction, pronominal DP, featural specification |
| Language: | English |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
Citations to this publication: 1
| 2 | Anca Sevcenco, Larisa Avram | Romanian-speaking children’s comprehension of relatives | RRL, LVII (2), 219-239 | 2012 | pdf html |
References in this publication: 1
| 2 | Anca Sevcenco, Larisa Avram | Romanian-speaking children’s comprehension of relatives | RRL, LVII (2), 219-239 | 2012 | pdf html |
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