Spontaneous and Elicited Production of European Portuguese Clefts

Clefts have not received much attention in the acquisition literature, even though they raise relevant questions: most clefts imply the projection of CP (in some cases, an embedded CP); in most cases they imply A’-movement; and the production of a cleft is subject to semantic-pragmatic constraints to the extent that clefted material is generally interpreted as focused. In particular, European Portuguese clefts may be of special interest for acquisition, given their diversity. In what follows, we show that European Portuguese displays a wide variety of cleft structures involving different degrees of syntactic complexity (defined according to a specific Complexity Metric) and we make explicit the predictions that the analysis of these different cleft types makes for the acquisition path.Based on the analysis of spontaneous production (6 children 1;2-4;6, 37376 child utterances) and on an elicited production task eliciting subject, direct object, indirect object and adjunct clefts, applied to 22 adult, 14 3-year-olds (mean 3;6), 20 4-year-olds (mean 4;6), 17 5-year-olds (mean 5;6), we discuss the emergence of different types of clefts. Earlier emergence of é que clefts confirms both Soares (2006) prediction based on a scale of complexity (Derivational Complexity Metric) and an analysis of é que clefts as monoclausal structures. Moreover, the asymmetry found in clefts is not a simple subject/object asymmetry, it is instead a subject vs. (direct/indirect) object, adjunct asymmetry, a fact weakening an intervention explanation in Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi´s (2009) terms. Finally, the data also support the analysis of certain types of fragments as partially elided clefts, both in adult and in child speech.