How Do Children Say “Yes” in European Portuguese?

Abstract

"This paper provides some preliminary findings of a project concerning the acquisition of answer patterns to yes-no questions in European Portuguese (EP). It is argued that the acquisition of these answer patterns provides evidence for language modularity: the relevant modules are syntax, discourse and pragmatics. More specifically, it will be shown that the syntactic availability of different answer patterns in EP is not coincident with the emergence of certain discourse and pragmatic abilities involved in the adult usage of these answers. The data on the acquisition of answers to yes-no questions in EP are also shown to be evidence for (i) the early availability of the notion of Topic, (ii) the early availability of VP ellipsis and (iii) early difficulty in dealing with prosodic and discourse cues that allow a yes-no question to be interpreted as a confirmation request"