L1 acquisition of noun ellipsis in French and in Dutch: Consequences for linguistic theory

In the literature several theoretical analyses of nominal ellipsis of various languages have been proposed. In this exploratory and comparative study the L1 French and Dutch acquisition of noun ellipsis is analyzed. The L1 data suggest that a theoretical analysis of the licensing mechanisms of nominal ellipsis should take the following observations into account. First, the acquisition of nominal ellipsis by French and Dutch children proceeds essentially in the same way, even though the adult languages differ. Second, as proposed in previous studies, not the presence of a determiner or inflection but the presence of an element with a partitive meaning seems to be a crucial factor in the licensing mechanism.