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Abstract:
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The interaction between syntax and morphology during the process of language acquisition is a central problem in the field of psycholinguistics because it relates directly to the issue of how linguistic knowledge is represented in the mind. The syntactic phenomenon known as N-drop, which leads to the presence of null nouns, is particularly suited because their productivity in Spanish has been related to the richness of the morphological paradigm of the Spanish determiners. In this respect, a number of studies focus on the presence of functional categories (e.g. the Determiner Phrase) versus lexical categories (e.g. nouns) in the first stages of primary and non primary language acquisition. In this thesis we analyze three different types of data from L1 and L2 Spanish in order to test whether the mastering of the Spanish morphology inside the Determiner Phrase can be related to the production of null nouns and whether functional elements are present in our subjects' grammars from the onset of their acquisitional process. |
