Minimal Answers: Ellipsis, Syntax And Discourse In The Acquisition Of European Portuguese (language Acquisition And Language Disorders)

This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the acquisition of the syntax-discourse interface. It provides evidence that children acquiring European Portuguese have a very early ability to spontaneously produce VP ellipsis as answers to yes-no questions. It is also argued that the distribution of VP ellipsis in European Portuguese (including its co-existence with Null Complement Anaphora) supports the hypothesis that the identification condition on ellipsis is derivable from some innate knowledge of the syntax-discourse interface. Answers to yes-no questions also provide evidence concerning children’s interpretation of questions containing a cleft or the operator __só__ ‘only’. The analysis of spontaneous production is complemented by a comprehension experiment, showing that children have two problems in the interpretation of these questions: (i) they do not understand that the cleft and __só__ introduce a presupposition and (ii) they start with a default focus assignment strategy and may not access other focus interpretations. List of tables -- List of figures -- Preface -- Abbreviations used in glosses -- 1. Introduction -- 2. VPE and the structural and anaphoric properties of minimal answers in EP adult grammar -- 3. Learnability issues in VPE and focus -- 4. How early can VPE be found? -- 5. Answers as a window into the interpretation of questions -- 6. Conclusions -- References In this chapter, I present a summary of the main results presented in the preceding chapters. I also point to issues left for future research