Object Clitics as Last Resort : Implications for language acquisition

Abstract

"Various studies dealing with the emergence of Accusative direct object clitics (ADOCs) have revealed that they are not used in an adult-like fashion from the first observable stages. The present paper investigates the acquisition of ADOCs in Romanian. The novelty of the analysis derives both from the type of investigated data and from the research method. This is the first study which investigates the acquisition of ADOCs in Romanian on the basis of longitudinal data starting from the identification of the obligatory ADOC contexts in the adult system. A similar method was used for the study of early Accusative clitics in French (Pîrvulescu 2006). The present study, though, starts from the identification of the obligatory ADOC contexts, rather than from the permissible ones. This restriction is required by the properties of clitic doubling constructions in Romanian"