On the late acquisition of WH in situ in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this paper I am concerned with the acquisition of WH in situ questions in Brazilian Portuguese. I try to account for the fact that the child being studied here starts producing this type of question relatively late, if compared to the production of other structures occurring at the left periphery of the sentence. This fact is surprising, given that in adult language such constructions are fairly frequent (cf. Lopes-Rossi (1996)). I present an analysis to the child's data claiming that the child changes her initial setting of the parameter regulating the operation of WH movement. This parameter resetting is triggered by the identification of a cue present in the input. Such parameter resetting is argued to be necessary to properly account for the acquisition data.