On the acquisition of accusative and dative clitic pronouns in French-speaking children

Abstract

Based on the findings from Cardinaletti et al. (2021), this thesis analyses the production of 3rd person singular accusative and dative clitic pronouns in French-speaking children attending a primary school in Geneva. The test used in Cardinaletti et al. was translated into French and used to observe any differences in the production of the two types of clitic pronouns in the two languages. Previous research on French clitics has mainly focused on direct object clitic pronouns, leading to some hypotheses as to why the rates of target productions are lower than those of subject pronouns (e.g., Tuller et al., 2011), and particularly low in French compared to other Romance languages. For this specific group of children, the production of target sentences is rather low overall, possibly due to the syntactical characteristics of clitic pronouns, which require the retrieval of a contextual antecedent, and due to a plausible interference of other languages in the children’s mental grammar. The production of both accusative and dative pronouns has not yet reached full competence at the age of 8 years, as expected by Delage et al. (2016), due to marking of phi-features in clitics, contextual retrieval of the referent, and optionality of clitics in spoken French. According to the data analysed from this test, however, French dative clitic pronouns appear to be much more complex than accusative clitics – despite dative clitics only encoding Number phi-features, while accusative clitics are marked for both Gender and Number.