Partitivity, Atomization, and Noun-Drop: A Longitudinal Study of French Child Language

Abstract

This article examines noun-drop constructions in French-speaking children. French being intermediate between English (which rarely allows noun-drop) and Spanish (which freely allows it) with respect to the richness of their respective morphological systems, it provides a fertile testing ground for various agreement-based analyses of noun-drop. We conclude, along with Snyder, Senghas, & Inman (2001) Snyder, William, Ann, Senghas and Kelly, Inman. 2001. Agreement morphology and the acquisition of noun-drop in Spanish.. Language Acquisition, 9(2): 157–173. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] that agreement is not a factor in the licensing of these constructions. Moreover, limitations on the occurrence of this phenomenon (i.e., not all adjective types allow it) in French lead us to propose that semantic, rather than syntactic, factors are responsible for noun-drop in French, i.e., partitivity and atomization (in the sense of Bouchard 2002 Bouchard, Denis. 2002. Adjectives, number, and interfaces., Amsterdam: Elsevier. [Google Scholar]). This in turn assigns the determiner a more important role than had previously been assumed in the licensing of noun-drop. Ultimately, our analysis illustrates how child language can be used to discriminate between competing analyses of a given syntactic process.