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SUMMARY:Clitic (Mis)Placement in Early Grammars: Evidence from Cypriot Gre
 ek - Theoni Neokleous\, RCEAL\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20110503T150000Z
DTEND:20110503T163000Z
UID:TALK28505@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Chris Cummins
DESCRIPTION:The first language acquisition of clitic constructions has bee
 n widely studied cross-linguistically (such as Hamann et al. 1996 for Fren
 ch\, Schaeffer 1997 for Dutch\, Costa at al. 2007 et\nseq. for European Po
 rtuguese\, Marinis 2000 for Greek\, Guasti 1993/94 for Italian\, Babyonysh
 ev &\nMarin 2005 for Romanian\, Ilic & Ud Deen 2003 for Serbo-Croatian\, W
 exler et al. 2004 for Spanish).\nThe focus of acquisitional studies regard
 ing the syntax of pronominal clitics has been the phenomenon\nof clitic re
 alisation and omission\, namely why there are early languages that exhibit
  clitic omission and\nearly languages that do not. There is\, however\, an
 other interesting discrepancy among clitic languages:\nlanguages that exhi
 bit clitic misplacement at the onset of L1 acquisition and languages that 
 do not. So\nfar\, the phenomenon of clitic misplacement has been observed 
 in early European Portuguese (Costa &\nLobo 2007\, Duarte & Matos 2000)\, 
 and early Cypriot-Greek (Petinou & Terzi 2002)\, but not in early\nStandar
 d Modern Greek\, French\, Italian or Spanish. The investigation of this no
 n-adult-like pattern\nin child language is expected to offer useful indica
 tions for the manifestation of syntactic operations\ninvolved in clitic pl
 acement.\n\nI present a study on the L1 acquisition of clitic placement in
  Cypriot Greek\, based on\nspontaneous speech and experimental data. Spont
 aneous speech data are comprised of one-hour\nrecordings of nine Greek-Cyp
 riot children\, aged 2\;3 – 3\;4\, two of which were also followed\nlong
 itudinally for a period of six months. The experimental investigation invo
 lves the implementation\nof semi-structured elicitation techniques\, inclu
 ding a picture-based task and a puzzle task\, in young\nGreek-Cypriot chil
 dren\, 2-\, 3- and 4-year-olds. Data analysis reveals a different pattern 
 for the\nacquisition of enclisis and proclisis environments. Enclisis cont
 exts are adult-like from the onset\,\nwhereas proclisis contexts remain pr
 oblematic for some children\, who produce post-verbal instead\nof pre-verb
 al clitics. Children’s clitic placement shows a bi-modal distribution an
 d their choices are\nsystematic. Some children below the age of three over
 generalize the enclisis pattern independently of\nthe syntactic environmen
 t. This result is explained as a consequence of the overgeneralization of 
 verb\nmovement across syntactic contexts at the onset of L1 acquisition.
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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