SUBJECTS IN CHILD ROMANIAN: EVIDENCE OF EARLY SENSITIVITY TO ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
SUBJECTS IN CHILD ROMANIAN: EVIDENCE OF EARLY SENSITIVITY TO ARGUMENT STRUCTURE

Summary/Abstract: Recent acquisition studies have shown that children’s early subjects mirror sensitivity to the argument structure of predicates (Larusso, Caprin and Guasti 2004, Cabre Sans and Gavarró 2007). The data reported in these studies reveal a lower subject omission rate with unaccusatives, as well as an early preference to place the subject of unaccusatives in post-verbal position. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the distribution of early subjects in child Romanian with a view to identifying whether the way in which children use overt subjects reveals early sensitivity to the unaccusative/unergative/transitive distinction. The paper analyzes the distribution of early subjects on the basis of one longitudinal corpus of monolingual Romanian (child B., age range 1;9- 2;10, 15 hours of transcribed conversations of spontaneous speech between the child and a caretaker). In line with previous findings for Spanish, Italian and Catalan, our results show that the Romanian child is sensitive to the argument structure of the predicate. The rate of post-verbal subjects is higher with unaccusatives than with transitives or with unergatives. The rate of null subjects is lower with unaccusatives.

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