First Language Acquisition in Spanish: A Minimalist Approach to Nominal Agreement

This title provides new insight on the acquisition of functional categories within the Minimalist Framework. This book provides new insights into the acquisition of functional categories in child language. "Operating within the Minimalist Framework" (Chomsky 1995) examines in particular the availability of Determiner Phrases in the grammar of young children acquiring Spanish as a first language. The analysis reveals an interaction in child grammar around the production of bare nominals, proto-determiners and full determiner phrases. Socarras performs both qualitative and quantitative analysis to point to a link between the development stages children go through, and the occurrence of these elements in their speech. The work goes on to address the language acquisition debate between the continuity and discontinuity hypothesis, aligning the findings with a conclusion on how best to organise the theory. "Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics" publishes work at the forefront of present-day developments in the field. The series is open to studies from all branches of theoretical linguistics and to the full range of theoretical frameworks. Titles in the series present original research that makes a new and significant contribution and are aimed primarily at scholars in the field, but are clear and accessible, making them useful also to students, to new researchers and to scholars in related disciplines.