Acquisition of auxiliary selection in French and Italian and the role of input

This paper focuses on child acquisition of perfective auxiliaries in French and Italian by analysing auxiliary productions in naturalistic corpora and considering the role of input. Unlike languages like English or Spanish, which use have with all verb types, French and Italian use both be and have to express the perfective. Be-selection is a general marker for unaccusative and reflexive verbs, while unergative and transitive verbs select have. Previous work has shown that there exists considerable variation in auxiliary selection in some varieties of French, with increased use of have in contexts which require be in standard French. In acquisition studies, it is not yet clear whether non-adultlike child productions in French are evenly distributed or restricted to be-selecting verbs, while an asymmetry by person/number form has been reported for reflexives. Our results show firstly that child errors in French are indeed restricted to be-selecting verb types, but this pattern is specific to French and does not occur in child Italian. Importantly, the absence of variability in the input shows that these are child innovations. We further show that the asymmetry by person/number form is specific to 1SG be and occurs with intransitives in addition to reflexives. A more detailed analysis considering homophonous forms in spoken French demonstrates that these 1SG errors are not auxiliary selection errors but instead represent extensions of 3SG be to 1SG be contexts due to the later production of the 1SG form of the be paradigm.