Acrisio Pires

Jason Rothman

This volume brings together chapters written by specialists in North America, Europe and Brazil. It includes original research about the acquisition (L1, bilingualism) and acquisition/ learning (L2 or L3) of dialects of Brazilian and European Portuguese. In an effort to maximize volume cohesion, the emphasis has been on contributions that present studies exploring both empirical/experimental and theoretical aspects of the acquisition of syntax, and its interfaces with morphology, with semantics/pragmatics, and with language change. Within the generative paradigm alone there are various volumes on the acquisition of other languages, but there are no volumes currently in print focusing on the acquisition of Portuguese. We believe that it is time for such a volume, considering among other factors that Portuguese is the second most widely spoken Romance language (second only to Spanish), and the seventh most widely spoken language in the world. In addition, the significant changes that have taken place between Brazilian and European Portuguese especially since the 19th century make the inquiry into the acquisition of the different dialects a source for very productive insights about the connections between linguistic theory, language acquisition and language change. Finally, having a collection of high quality articles in one place pays homage to the importance for linguistic research of investigations into the acquisition of the Portuguese language.

Case Studies across Portuguese

Minimalist Inquiries into Child and Adult Language Acquisition

This book unifies the analysis of certain non-finite domains, focusing on subject licensing, agreement, and Case and control. It proposes a minimalist analysis of English gerunds which allows only a null subject PRO (TP-defective gerunds), a lexical subject (gerunds as complements of perception verbs), or both types of subjects (clausal gerunds). It then analyzes Portuguese infinitives, showing that the morphosyntactic properties of non-inflected and inflected infinitives correlate with distinct treatments of obligatory and non-obligatory control. It explores these and other phenomena to show that tense and event binding do not correlate with the contrast between control and raising/exceptional case marking (ECM), against null Case theories of control. A Probe-Goal approach to Case and agreement is adopted in combination with a movement analysis of control. The book then investigates diachronic morphosyntactic phenomena involving infinitives, verb movement and cliticization in Portuguese, exploring a cue-based theory of syntactic change grounded in language acquisition.

Gerunds and Infinitives

The Minimalist Syntax of Defective Domains

Biographical note: Acrisio Pires, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA; Jason Rothman, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA.

Acrisio Pires

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