The Acquisition of French Subject Pronouns in Child and Adult Learners

In this study, we will analyse the acquisition of subject pronouns in French and the distribution of Null subjects in early stages of language acquisition. We will contrast bilingual first language acquisition (2L1) and adult second language acquisition (L2). In both cases, Swedish is present as one of the two languages of the bilingual children, and as source language for the L2 learners. We will show that with respect to subjects there are clear differences between early 2L1 grammars and these early L2 grammars in that the children first pass through a stage where Null subjects are possible. This stage is followed by the use of subject pronouns as clitics. The adult Swedish learners practically never omit subjects and tend to treat subject pronouns as weak or strong, following the typology presented in Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). At least some properties of subject clitics are very hard for these learners to acquire