Actional Passives in Child Catalan

Abstract

This thesis results from the first comprehensive investigation into children's acquisition of actional passives in two varieties of Catalan: Central Catalan and Majorcan Catalan. The acquisition of passives by children has proved to be delayed in a number of languages, especially those which do not have s-homophones between an adjectival passive and a verbal passive. Firstly, a study of spontaneous production in children and adults was made to see the frequency of the different kinds of passives (periphrastic, adjectival and pronominal) for both groups. Using a sentence-picture matching task I undertook a first experiment to see if there was delay in the acquisition of actional passives in Catalan. Also, and because the by-phrase in Majorcan Catalan has the same preposition as agentive nominals, a second experiment was run to see the possible facilitation of having the same preposition in the comprehension of long passive constructions; no effect of the preposition was found. Lastly, a third experiment was run to check the comprehension of adjectival passives versus short passives; verbal passives were shown to be interpreted as adjectival until the age of 7.

Date of Award	5 Feb 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Supervisor	Anna Gavarró Algueró (Director)