Null objects and acquisition of clitic pronouns in L2 European Portuguese – Data from comprehension of Chinese learners

• Autor(a) principal: Gu, Wenjun
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/ro.v0i3.31906

This paper presents a study on the acquisition of production/omission of clitic pronouns in European Portuguese as L2. With the aid of an acceptability judgment task among a group of Chinese learners of Portuguese, we intend to verify the observations made in previous studies both in L1 and in L2, namely with respect to the correlation between clitic omission in the acquisition of Portuguese and the null object construction in this language. The preliminary results revealed a general preference of the participants for the production of clitics in Portuguese rather than their omission, as observed in some of the previous studies, and at the same time, a variation in the participants’ judgements about the linguistic phenomenon in question, without much evidence of their knowledge about the specific domains of the distribution of null objects in Portuguese, supposedly contradicting the effects of this construction on the production/ omission of clitics in language acquisition, as previously presumed and confirmed in some studies in Portuguese as L1.