Anaphoric pronouns for topic devices: theoretical claims and acquisitional evidence.
Jacqueline van Kampen · Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) · 2008
West-European languages use articles to distinguish arguments as .Besides articles there are personal pronouns that are to be indexed with a discourse antecedent.Superimposed on that system there are additional devices to indicate whether a clause has the same or a different element as its topic.If a sentence takes a topic different from the topic of the preceding sentence, there are devices with enhanced saliency to mark the sentence as .These devices vary with the type of language.The present paper will characterize the anaphoric pronouns in Germanic and Romance languages and range them upon a saliency scale.This will bring about a new analysis of the accessibility hierarchy for the antecedent.Subsequently, I will discuss the acquisition of anaphoric pronouns for in Germanic (V2nd) Dutch and Romance French.The data come from a longitudinal study of two CHILDES corpora.