Torrens, V. & Escobar, L.
Facultad de Psicologia, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Telicity is a property of accomplishment verbs with a direct object (Krifka, 1998). Tense has also a clear effect and the present perfect is usually part of telic predicates. In some languages we can also identify telicity markers as in English (Brinton, 1988) or Spanish (Nishida, 1994; Sanz 1999). In this paper we present empirical research on the acquisition of Spanish ?reflexive? clitic se. We applied a truth-judgment-value task in order to see whether Spanish children are able to acquire the Spanish telicity marker se at a similar early age. The results of our study indicate that this is not the case. Spanish children from 3;0 to 6;0 have more difficulty with the telicity marker se than with other ordinary telic predicates without the clitic. We now argue that the difficulty lies in the operator character of aspectual se. Clitics are challenging in language acquisition since they behave partly like independent words and partly like affixes. They seem to be more autonomous than affixes but they attach phonologically to a host, contrary to words. Likewise, clitic se contrasts with the English particle up which needn?t be attached phonologically to a host. Note that unlike up, clitic se in the second person singular te form is enclitic with the imperative. In our analysis clitic se is an operator, and it undergoes movement. We propose that se moves to check its operator feature against the aspectual head Asp of the Spanish clause and suggest that ?merge? is preferred over ?move? in children?s grammars as a more economical operation, which falls within the minimalist guidelines (Chomsky 1995, 1998). In this way we can finally explain the statistically significant difference (p < 0.001) in the acquisition of telic predicates with and without se in our experiment.