Acquisition of Syntax
Based on Guasti Chapter 4
&
Paul Hagstrom’s Website
1
Outline
• Lab 2
• Review & expand material covered last
week.
2
Basic structure of adult sentences
• IP (a.k.a. TP, INFLP, …)
is the position of modals
and auxiliaries, also
assumed to be home of
tense and agreement.
• CP is where wh-words
move and where I moves
in subject-aux-inversion
3
How child utterances differ from
adult ones
• Missing grammatical morphemes (e.g. 3sg -s, past tense
-ed)
Mumma ride horsie.
Papa have it.
• Missing auxiliaries (have, be, do)
Kitty hiding.
Eve gone.
Fraser not see him.
• Missing copula be
You nice.
That my briefcase.
4
Adult vs. child rerpresentations
VP
NP
V’
daddy
V
NP
play basketball
‘No functional
categoreis’ = ‘Small
Clause Hypothesis’
(Radford 1990, 1995)
5
Evidence for the Small Clause
Hypothesis
• Comes mainly from English
– Missing IP:
• No modals (kids drop them)
• No auxiliaries (Mommy doing dinner)
• No productive use of tense & agreement (Baby ride truck,
Mommy go, Daddy sleep)
– Missing CP:
• no complementizers (that, for, if)
• no preposed auxiliary (car go?)
• kids bad at comprehending wh-object questions (out of
canonical order). (—What are you doing? —No.)
6
Evidence against the Small Clause
Hypothesis: Negation
• Adult French:
Marie ne mange pas (V-fin Neg)
(pour) ne pas manger (Neg V-inf)
• Child French:
Elle roule pas (Neg V-inf)
Pas manger la poupée. (V-fin Neg)
7
Small Clause Hypothesis vs.
Full Competence Hypothesis
Poeppel & Wexler (1993).
Data: Andreas (2;1, from CHILDES)
– In adult German: finite verbs move to 2nd
position, nonfinite verbs are clause-final.
V2: Ich kaufe Blumen.
SOV: Ich will Blumen kaufen
NB! V2 comes about by moving the finite verb
to (head-initial) C, which is a functional
category.
– Does this also happen in child German?
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Small Clause Hypothesis vs.
Full Competence Hypothesis
+finite
-finite
V2
197
6
V final
11
37
Poeppel & Wexler (1993). Data: Andreas (2;1, from CHILDES).
• Conclusion: the finiteness distinction is made
correctly (at the earliest observable stage).
• This challenges the Small Clause Hypothesis.
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Small Clause Hypothesis vs.
Full Competence Hypothesis
• Adult German allows non-subjects to appear in
initial position in finite clauses (V2)
e.g. Eine Fase hab ich.
a
vase have I
• In infinitival clauses (SOV) only subjects can
appear in initial position in finite clauses
e.g. Ich will
Blumen kaufen.
I want to flowers buy
• Non-subjects (to the left of the verb) are a
functional category.
• Are children aware of this property?
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Small Clause Hypothesis vs.
Full Competence Hypothesis
+finite
-finite
SV(O)
130
24
XPV(O)
50
0
Poeppel & Wexler (1993). Data: Andreas (2;1, from CHILDES).
Initial non-subject -> verb is always finite
Conclusion:
Kids basically seem to be acting like
adults; their V2 is the same V2 that adults use.
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Full Competence Hypothesis: CP
• The Full Competence Hypothesis says not only
that functional categories exist, but that the child
has access to the same functional categories
that the adult does.
• In particular, CP should be there too.
• Predicts what we’ve seen:
– finite verbs are in second position
– nonfinite verbs are in final position
– non-subjects may precede a finite verb in second
position.
 Does this mean we should throw out the SCH?
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Problems for the Full Competence
Hypothesis: Root Infinitives
• Root infinitives (RIs) = Optional Infinitives (OIs)
• Children produce main clauses containing
an infinitive verb, rather than a finite verb
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Some examples of RIs
from Guasti p. 128
Hun sove (Jens, 2;0)
She sleep-inf
Earst kleine boekje lezen (Hein, 2;6)
first little book read
Dormir petit bébé (Daniel, 1;11)
Schokolade holen (Andreas, 2;1)
chocolate get
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Does English have RIs?
Papa have it (Eve, 1;6)
Cromer wear glasses (Eve, 2;0)
Marie go. (Sarah, 2;3)
Mumma ride horsie (Sarah, 2;6)
What seems to be different between English
and the previous examples?
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Maturational explanation
• Perhaps RIs are subject to maturation of
certain grammatical principles
• Only when the time comes can these
principles ‘mature’ and the RIs disappear
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Do all languages have RIs?
– OI languages: Germanic languages studied
to date (Danish, Dutch, English, Icelandic,
Norwegian, Swedish), Irish, Russian, Brazilian
Portuguese, Czech
– Non-OI languages: Italian, Spanish, Catalan
Is this problematic for a maturational approach?
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Some properties of RIs
• RIs do not occur in pro-drop languages.
They are used in an adult-like way
e.g. per cuocere (Martina 1;8)
to cook-inf
‘in order to cook’
Voglio bere
want-1sg drink-inf
‘(I) want to drink’
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Some properties of RIs
• RI clauses are not introduced by
nonsubject XPs in V2 languages
*Die Blumen haben ich
The flowers have-inf I
Unattested in child utterances!
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Some properties of RIs
• RIs occur in declarative sentences but not
in wh-questions (e.g. Dutch)
+Finite -Finite
Declaratives
3768
721
Wh-questions
80
2
Based on Haegeman 1995. (Hein 2;4 – 3;1)
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Some properties of RIs
• RIs are incompatible with auxiliaries.
e.g. *Marie avoir mangé la pomme.
Unattested in child utterances!
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A possible explanation of RIs
Truncation Theory (Rizzi 1993/1994)
• A child can choose to project all the way up to CP, or he
can project just part of the way up.
• But he can’t leave anything out from the middle of the
tree.
• The difference between the child and the adult:
• the adult takes CP as the root node of any sentence,
whereas the child can choose anything as the root node.
• The extra constraint requiring CP to be the root is
something that emerges maturationally some time before
the child’s third birthday.
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Problems for Truncation: Where
train go?
• Truncation predicts: If TP is missing, then CP
should be missing.
• But Bromberg & Wexler (1995) observe that
bare verbs do appear in wh-questions in child
English. Wh-questions implicate CP, bare verbs
implicate something missing (TP or AgrP). So,
truncation can’t be right.
• Guasti notes that although the logic here works,
English is weird in this respect: pretty much all
other languages do accord with the prediction,
so perhaps in English we are not dealing with
real RIs after all (e.g. null auxiliary).
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• Children learn language in a highly
systematic way
• Many similarities can be observed in child
language acquisition across languages
• Children’s errors are also systematic and
similar across languages.
• What could this ultimately mean?
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