The Acquisition of Direct Object Scrambling and Clitic Placement: Syntax and Pragmatics (review)

This revision of the author’s1997 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) doctoral dissertation deals exactly with what the title promises. It contains an excellent discussion of the syntax and pragmatics involved in children’s acquisition of direct object scrambling (in Dutch) and direct object clitic placement (in Italian), two phenomena, scrambling and cliticization, that Schaeffer relates to one another (in a move that echoes other recent work on these topics, such as is made particularly explicit in Dominique Sportiche’s1992 UCLA manuscript, ‘Clitic construtions’, and related research).

Ch. 1 forms the ‘Introduction’ (1–14) to this book. S lays out the relevance of the study of first language acquisition to linguistics, and ultimately to the theory of grammar (touching here on topics that she returns to throughout, such as continuity vs. maturation, parameter (re)setting, modularity, or clause structure). Ch. 2, ‘Object scrambling and cliticization’ (15–49), deals with the aforementioned explicit connection in adult language(s: Dutch and Italian), rounding off a fine discussion with implications and predictions for child language acquisition. Ch. 3 introduces the ‘Methodology’ (51–66) that S employed in her experiments with Dutch and Italian children. The ‘Results and discussion’ (67–101) of these experiments are reported in Ch. 4. ‘Some further results’ (103–19) are presented in Ch. 5, highlighting the use of bare, determinerless nominals by very young children and the role of adverbs in older Dutch children’s scrambling syntax, as well as some issues relating to child production of Italian clitics(clitic placement across construction types, the position of object clitics, and phonological overgeneralization in unexpected cases of contraction). Ch. 6 offers a ‘Conclusion’ (121–24) to this study, summarizing the main results, discussing implications for acquisition theories, and offering predictions and other topics for future research.

The full-length appendix (125–74) contains the scenarios S employed in her experiments(under the oddly phrased headings ‘Scenarios Dutch experiment on direct object scrambling’, ‘English translation Dutch experiments’, ‘Scenarios Italian experiment on direct object clitic placement’, and ‘English translations Italian experiments’, listed as such in the table of contents as well). These headings coupled with the pluralis majestatis throughout and a poor index are my only quibbles with this book —not a lot, really, and nothing substantial.

This book is of obvious interest to researchers in the domains of scrambling and cliticization at large, but it can be recommended as a must-read to anyone interested in the connection between linguistic theory and language acquisition, and how to go about it, something that is unfortunately lacking in much of the current (acquisition) literature. S’s book is a theoretically well-informed and -informing contribution to the field.