L'adquisició del català en infants portuguesos: un estudi sobre l'ús i el coneixement dels pronoms clítics

Abstract

Summary: Clitic pronouns represent one of the most idiosyncratic properties of Catalan due to their polymorphism as well as to their syntactic and discursive functions. The participants in this study are 4 L1 Portuguese children learning Catalan and a control group of 6 L1 Catalan children. Both groups are aged between 11 and 12 years and are attending a Primary School in a Catalan immersion context in Andorra. The main objectives are to observe and to analyze the usage and knowledge of the accusative and dative clitic pronouns and those of the adverbial pronouns en and hi, the latter two in their appearance in dislocated constructions. Portuguese has both accusative and dative clitics but, unlike Portuguese, Catalan has obligatory pronouns for location (hi) and a partitive pronoun (en). In Romance languages, focused phrases can move to the right or to the left periphery depending on the speaker’s communicative intention. This structure provides an additional pragmatics-informative value which can contribute to the difficulties in the acquisition of Catalan as a second language by children. [Keywords: Syntax; pragmatics; second language; acquisition; Catalan; Portuguese]