Untitled - Lear

Developmental patterns of complement clitics
production conducted by Schmitz and Müller (in press) shows an initial absence and
about the same delay (5 months) for the child Gregoire from the Childes database
(see also Friedemann (1992) and Rasetti (2003) for the same conclusions regarding
this child).
age
(y;m,d)
Table 2: Occurrences of subject and complement clitics
in relevant utterances in the Augustin-corpus
verbal
utterances
subject
clitics
% of verbal
utterances
complement
clitics
% of relevant
utterances
2;0,2 57 17 29.8 0 0
2;0,23 30 4 13.3 0 0
2;1,15 22 4 18.2 0 0
2;2,13 55 16 29.1 1 3.8
2;3,10 45 12 26.6 0 0
2;4,1 62 10 16.1 0 0
2;4,22 54 11 20.4 1 5.0
2;6,16 116 25 21.6 2 3.9
2;9,2 175 80 45.7 10 14.3
2;9,30 115 99 63.4 22 33.9
Total 771 278 36.1 36 10.5
Moreover, table 3 indicates that if complement clitics are radically absent in
Augustin’s speech at the beginning of recording, they reach a level of around 30%
occurrence, the level found for subject clitics at the very beginning, only in the last
recording where we observe a concomitant decrease in the rate of the occurrence of
lexical complements as well as in the rate of clitic omissions. The same is true for
Louis (Rasetti (2003, 257)). 15
15 See also Wexler, Gavarró, Torrens (2004), Babyonyshev and Marin (2004) for recent
discussion on the different omission rates in different Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan,
Romanian in particular) in L1 acquisition.
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