Hostname: page-component-6898cfcb55-zkb6p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-11T19:15:21.664Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Subjects and Interface Delay in Child Spanish and Catalan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

John Grinstead
John Grinstead*
Affiliation:
University of Northern Iowa
*
Department of Modern Languages, Baker 271, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0504 [john.grinstead@uni.edu]
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I observe that in an early stage of child Catalan and Spanish, no overt subjects are used. At this same age and MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE (MLU), child speakers of overt subject languages such as French, German, Dutch, and English use at least some overt subjects optionally. I explain this crosslinguistic variation by suggesting that the adult target grammars vary with respect to the position in which overt subjects are realized. In the overt subject languages, subjects are realized in the canonical specifier-of-IP position, whereas in the null subject languages (such as Catalan and Spanish), subjects are located in a topic/focus position, which becomes accessible only later in development. As evidence for this, I show that overt subjects, fronted objects, and WH-questions begin to be used at the same point in development in child Catalan and Spanish. I also argue that subject agreement constitutes an incorporated pronominal subject in Catalan and Spanish and that children converge on this parametric option very early. The inability of child Spanish- and Catalan-speakers to use discourse-pragmatic information is explained as a delay in the development of the interface between grammar and discourse-pragmatics.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , March 2004, pp. 40 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Antell, S., and Keating, D. P. 1983. Perception of numerical invariance in neonates. Child Development 54. 695–710.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Armon-Lotem, Sharon. 1997. Agreement mismatches and the economy of derivation. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 22. 27–35.Google Scholar
Avrutin, Sergey. 1994. Psycholinguistic investigations in the theory of reference. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Baker, Mark. 1996. The polysynthesis parameter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Nancy, and Greenfield, Patricia. 1988. The development of new and old information in young children's early language. Language Sciences 10. 3–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belletti, Adriana. 1990. Generalized verb movement. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier.Google Scholar
Berman, Ruth A. 1990. On acquiring an (S)VO language: Subjectless sentences in children's Hebrew. Linguistics 28. 1135–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, Paul. 1990. Subjectless sentences in child language. Linguistic Inquiry 21. 491–504.Google Scholar
Bloom, Paul. 1993. Grammatical continuity in language development: The case of subjectless sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 24. 721–34.Google Scholar
Brucart, José María. 1987. La elision. Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra.Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna. 1996. Subjects and clause structure. University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 6. 55–95.Google Scholar
Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen. 1991. On the typology of wh-questions. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Clahsen, Harald. 1990. Constraints on parameter setting: A grammatical analysis of some acquisition stages in early German child language. Language Acquisition 1. 361–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen. 1990. Clitic doubling, wh-movement and quantification in Romanian. Linguistic Inquiry 21. 351–98.Google Scholar
Fassi-Fehri, Abdelkader. 1993. Issues in the structure of Arabic clauses and words. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-017-1986-5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The modularity of the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/4737.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68. 1–76.Google ScholarPubMed
Giorgi, Alessandra, and Pianesi, Fabio. 1997. Tense and aspect: From semantics to morphosyntax: Oxford studies in comparative syntax. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Grinstead, John. 1994. The emergence of nominative case assignment in child Catalan and Spanish. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles M.A. thesis.Google Scholar
Grinstead, John. 1998. Subjects, sentential negation and imperatives in child Spanish and Catalan. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles dissertation.Google Scholar
Grinstead, John. 2000a. Tense, number and nominative case assignment in child Catalan and Spanish. Journal of Child Language 27. 119–55.10.1017/S0305000999004043CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grinstead, John. 2000b. Constraints on the computational component vs. grammar in the lexicon: A discussion of Bates & Goodman. Journal of Child Language 27. 737–43.Google Scholar
Grinstead, John, MacSwan, Jeffrey, Curtiss, Susan; and Gelman, Rochel. 1998. The independence of language and number. Paper presented at Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, November 1998.Google Scholar
Guasti, Maria Teresa. 1994. Verb syntax in Italian child grammar: Finite and non-finite verbs. Language Acquisition 3. 1–40.10.1207/s15327817la0301_1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. 1995. Root infinitives, tense and truncated structures. Language Acquisition 4. 205–55.Google Scholar
Jelinek, Eloise. 1984. Empty categories, case and configurationality. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2. 39–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, J., and Just, M. A. 1991. Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory. Journal of Memory and Language 30. 580–602.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landau, Barbara. 1999. Multiple geometric representations of objects in languages and language learners. Language and space, ed. by Bloom, Paul, Peterson, M. A., Nadel, L., and Garrett, M., 317–63. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Landau, Barbara, and Jackendoff, Ray. 1993. ‘What’ and ‘where’ in spatial language and spatial cognition. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 16. 217–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lasnik, Howard, and Uriagereka, Juan. 1988. A course in GB syntax: Lectures on binding and empty categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lempert, H., and Kinsbourne, M. 1985. Possible origin of speech in selective orienting. Psychological Bulletin 97. 62–73.10.1037/0033-2909.97.1.62CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian, and Snow, Catherine. 1985. The CHILDES project. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Marantz, Alec. 1991. Case and licensing. Paper presented at the Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, Baltimore, October 1991.Google Scholar
Maratsos, Michael. 1974. Preschool children's use of definite and indefinite articles. Child Development 45. 446–55.10.2307/1127967CrossRefGoogle Scholar
May, Robert. 1985. Logical form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Meisel, Jürgen, and Müller, Natascha. 1992. Finiteness and verb placement in early child grammars. The acquisition of verb placement, ed. by Meisel, Jürgen, 109–38. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muir, D., and Field, J. 1979. Newborn infants orient to sound. Child Development 50. 431–36.Google Scholar
Ordonez, Francisco. 1997. Word order and clause structure in Spanish and other romance languages. New York: CUNY dissertation.Google Scholar
Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20. 365–424.Google Scholar
Radford, Andrew. 1990. Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English syntax: The nature of early child grammars in English. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rivero, María Luis a, and Terzi, Arhonto. 1995. Imperatives, v-movement and logical mood. Journal of Linguistics 31. 301–32.10.1017/S0022226700015620CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. On the status of subject clitics in romance. Studies in romance linguistics, ed. by Jaeggli, Osvaldo and Silva-Corvalán, Carmen, 391–419. Dordrecht: Foris.10.1515/9783110878516-025CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. Relativized minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1991. Residual V2 and the wh-criterion. Geneva: University of Geneva, MS.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1994. Some notes on linguistic theory and language development. Language Acquisition 3. 371–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 2000. Comparative syntax and language acquisition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Roeper, Thomas, and Rohrbacher, Bernhard. 1994. Null subjects in early child English and the theory of economy of projection. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, and Amherst: University of Massachusetts, MS.Google Scholar
Rothstein, Susan. 1983. The syntactic forms of predication. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Schaeffer, Jeanette. 2000. The acquisition of direct object scrambling & clitic placement syntax & pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/lald.22CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schütze, Carson. 1997. INFL in child and adult language: Agreement, case and licensing. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Serra, Miquel, and Sole, Rosa. 1986. Language acquisition in Catalan and Spanish children. Barcelona: La Universitat de Barcelona and La Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, MS.Google Scholar
Sportiche, Dominique. 1992. Clitic constructions. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, MS.Google Scholar
Starkey, Prentice, and Cooper, Robert G. Jr. 1980. Perception of numbers by human infants. Science 210. 1033–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strauss, Mark S., and Curtis, Lynne E. 1984. Development of numerical concepts in infancy. Origins of cognitive skills, ed. by Sophian, C., 131–56. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Suñer, Margarita. 1988. The role of agreement in clitic doubled constructions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6. 391–434.10.1007/BF00133904CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suppes, Patrick, Smith, R.; and Leveillé, Madeleine. 1973. The French syntax of a child's noun phrases. Archives de Psychologie 42. 207–69.Google Scholar
Uribe-Etxebarria, Myriam. 1992. On the structural position of the subject in Spanish, their nature and their consequences for quantification. Syntactic theory and Basque syntax, ed. by Lakarra, J. and Ortiz de Urbina, J., 447–91. Donostia, San Sebastian: Supplements of the ASJU.Google Scholar
Valian, Virginia. 1991. Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children. Cognition 40. 21–81.10.1016/0010-0277(91)90046-7CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van Kampen, Jacqueline. 1997. First steps in wh-movement. Wageningen: Ponsen & Looijen.Google Scholar
von Hofsten, C. 1980. Predictive reaching for moving objects by human infants. Journal of Educational and Child Psychology 30. 369–82.Google ScholarPubMed
Wachs, T. D., and Chan, A. 1986. Specificity of environmental action, as seen in environmental correlates of infants' communication performance. Child Development 57. 1464–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Klaus. 1985. How much do children say in a day? Journal of Child Language 12. 475–87.10.1017/S0305000900006565CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wynn, Karen. 1990. Children's understanding of counting. Cognition 36. 155–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wynn, Karen. 1992. Children's acquisition of the number words and the counting system. Cognitive Psychology 24. 220–51.10.1016/0010-0285(92)90008-PCrossRefGoogle Scholar