Significado y sintaxis en las etapas iniciales del lenguaje infantil

Abstract

This paper investigates two aspects of the syntax-semantics interface that play an important role in language acquisition. After a very brief presentation of the theoretical framework of this investigation, I deal with the early syntactical development of Mexican Spanish. I argue that after the one word stage children produce two word sentences that do not have a fixed order because they are not constituted by a head and its argument. I present evidence that shows that the first head argument structures the children in this study produce contain an unaccusative verb followed by the subject or a transitive verb followed by the object, therefore, in both cases the semantic argument is the same. I deal with the acquisition of sequences of clitics as a syntactic-semantic interface problem. The purpose of the second part of this paper is to investigate the acquisition of the different word orders in Spanish. I present evidence that shows that once children start producing sentences with verbs and subjects they place the subject before or after the verb and the SV, VS alternation can be understood as an instance of optionality related to discourse considerations. The corpus analyzed shows that children under 4 yrs. of age correctly place the focused subject after transitive and inergative intransitive verbs and before unaccusative verbs. It also shows that children this age employ the SVO order to show sentence focus; the data presented suggest that these children use VSO and SVO in order to make the object more or less prominent.