VP - Ellipsis Comprehension in European and Brazilian Portuguese

Ellipses are quite common amongst languages. As Bar ss (2003) points out, ellipsis (as a type of anaphora) involves linguisti c expressions which receive their semantic interpretation “via a depend ency upon an antecedent, rather than from its internal lexical c ontent.” (p. ix) This makes ellipsis in and of itself an interesting topi c for language acquisition research since it is a syntax-discourse phenomenon which implies the development of both formal licensing conditions and identification conditions for convergence. Our aim in this paper is to examine the acquisition of one case of ellipsis, namely, VP ellipsis (VPE), in European Po rtuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP).