Complementos de verbos percetivos, causativos e de controlo de objeto em português europeu: dados da aquisição

In this paper we explore the acquisition of complements to object control, perception and causative verbs in European Portuguese. We present an exploratory research on young children elicited production of these complement types. Taking perception and causatives as R(aising) t(o) O(bject) verbs, we will be able to investigate children’s performance on raising and object control structures. The results show that both RtO and object control are avoided by pre-school children, who prefer less defective complements (which explains the low frequency of RtO structures) and structures with less theta-roles (which accounts for the problems in producing grammatical object control structures).