The comprehension of control and raising structures in Brazilian Portuguese child language
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14393/DLv20a2026-3Keywords:
Control, Raising, Language Acquisition, Afro-Brazilian Portuguese, Experimental studyAbstract
Studies about acquisition of control and raising structures have observed the age the comprehension of them emerges as well as how the process happens. Some researches were done in English (Becker, 2006; Hirsch; Orfitelli; Wexler, 2008) and Spanish (Mateu; Hyams, 2017) and they show different results about children’s ability to comprehend these structures in pre-scholar age (before 6-years-old). In the present article, we present a discussion based on the results of an off-line experimental study with children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Eighty-two children, aged between 3;2 and 5;11 participated in our study, and we aimed to observe if they could comprehend sentences with control and raising. In order to test the comprehension of the participants, we test known as Picture Selection Task (PST) (Schmitt; Miller, 2010). The description of control and raising structures and the study findings were done considering the Movement Theory of Control (MTC) (Hornstein, 1999, 2001, 2003; Boeckx; Hornstein, 2006, 2007; Nunes, 2010). The MTC claims that control and raising are derived employing A-movement, proposing an approximation of the structures in terms of derivation. Our findings suggest that the comprehension of control is prior to the comprehension of raising. This result is consistent with those obtained in studies conducted in other languages (English and Spanish). Furthermore, we also observed that when we take into account the Movement Theory of Control, A-movement does not appear to represent a difficulty for children from 3 years-old onwards, but it seems that other syntactic mechanisms may be involved in the causes of their struggling in understanding sentences with raising, such as type of complement and/or an intervenient argument. The main objectives of the present research are to contribute for the studies about the development of control and raising, and to analyze the linguistic behavior of children acquiring them in Brazilian Portuguese.
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