ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system—epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [– epistemic] contexts, the selection of a subjunctive complement is especially troublesome under [+ epistemic; – veridical] predicates. A corpus analysis, meant to characterize the input to which children are exposed, showed that this pattern of mood distribution is not entirely explained by verb frequency or by mood variability in the input. We argue that children go through a stage in which they are not able to map mood morphology to the required sum of features and give priority to epistemicity only. Thus, while in early stages the [+/– epistemic] contrast influences mood choices, the [+/– veridic] contrast (particularly in epistemic contexts) does not. Despite that, we provide new evidence that children rely on the relevant semantic features throughout the process of mood acquisition.

摘要

本文重点介绍欧洲葡萄牙语（EP）的早期补语中的语气习得。EP情绪系统涉及两个语义特征-持久性和真实性。对80名4至9岁的儿童进行的一项生产任务表明，即使儿童在[–认知]语境中使用虚拟语气，在[+认知]下虚拟语气补语的选择也特别麻烦。– [veridical]谓词。旨在描述儿童所接触的输入的特征的语料库分析表明，这种情绪分布模式不能完全由动词频率或输入中的情绪变化来完全解释。我们认为儿童经历了一个阶段，在这个阶段中，他们无法将情绪形态映射到所需的特征总和，仅优先考虑认知。从而，在早期阶段，[+/–认知]对比会影响情绪选择，[+/–韵律]对比（尤其是在认知环境中）则不会。尽管如此，我们提供了新的证据表明儿童在整个情绪获得过程中都依赖于相关的语义特征。