Abstract
Recently, various authors have argued within a Universal Grammar framework (Chomsky 1986) that the form of early child language is determined in part by the nature of the vocabulary available. Guilfoyle & Noonan (1988), Lebeaux (1988), and Radford (1990) for English, and Platzack (1989) for Swedish assume that functional categories, particularly the Isystem, are initially absent in these languages. Clahsen (to appear) and Tracy et al. (1990) for German; Pierce (1989) for French, and Penner (1990) for Bernese Swiss assume that in these languages certain functional categories, (e. g. complementizers, agreement) are initially missing. Other properties of early child language, like missing subjects, the absence of verb movement, the absence of case assignment, VP-internal subjects, and so on, follow from this type of analysis.
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Notes
E. g. differences in the properties of AGR/INFL, that may be rich or not (see Rizzi 1986), or of I/C, that may contain a finiteness operator or not (see Platzack & Holmberg 1989).
Stage I concerns basically the one-word stage.
Clahsen leaves open whether there is an additional stage preceding the adult stage characterized by the following structure: This stage would correspond to stage where subject-verb agreement but not yet complementisers are to be found.
Clahsen uses F instead of I. There is nothing in Clahsen’s account that hinges on this notational difference. I will thus continue to use I in my discussion.
For details, see Clahsen (1988a).’ Transitivity’ is used by Clahsen in the functional sense of Hopper and Thompson’s (1980) transitivity scale.
The present tense inflectional paradigm is as follows: geh-en’ to go’: In addition, -en also functions as an infinitive marker (geh-en) and, like-t, as a past participle marker (gekommen’ (has)come’, gemacht’ (has)made’. The 1st and 3rd person singulars of modals have a zero morpheme; e. g. können’ can’: ich kann-0, er/sie/es kann-0. First person-e and-0, as well as infinitival-en and-e often occur in free variation in certain dialects of German.
Clahsen follows Webelhuth & den Besten (1987) by adjoining NEG to VP. This is problematic (for discussion see Grewendorf 1990, Bayer 1990b).
The following discussion is based on longitudinal data collected by Max Miller (1979) (S), Christiane von Stutterheim (H), and myself (B). Im am only taking into account utterances by the child that contain at least one verb. The data from S have also been used in Clahsen (1988b, to appear).
The question of the nature of the position in which the finite verb is situated is not relevant at this point. It will be discussed in section 2.1 will thus use INFL which corresponds to F used by Clahsen (see note 4).
According to Clahsen (1986) about 80 of the uses of -t are correct.
A contextual analysis of apparent exceptions like (i) stecke(n) balla S 22;20’ put (in) ball’shows that the noun has to be analyzed as extraposed.
Mills (1985) in her analysis of part of the Miller data reached the same conclusion.
The development of verb placement in French points to the same conclusion (Weissenbom, Verrips & Berman 1989, Verrips & Weissenbom 1990).
The primacy of tense/aspect systems can also be observed in Creoles. In addition, the fact that Tense and Aspect phrases are assumed to be generated closer to the VP than the (Subject) Agreement phrase (AGRPs) (Beletti 1988; Koopman & Sportiche 1989) reflects the implicational hierarchy between finiteness and subject-verb agreement (see Bybee 1984 for a discussion of implicational relations between inflectional categories).
An apparent counterexample like (i) Julia schere nich darf M 33;1 (from Clahsen 1988a)’Julia scissors not may (3rd pers. sing) can be interpreted as a complementiserless embedded sentence with the standard verb final structure. Sentences of this type occur at that time, as shown below (see also Rothweiler 1989; Tracy et al. 1990).
With respect to the learning problem that the child has to solve, one may also assume that the binary finiteness distinction is easier to acquire than the multiple person/number relations found in subject-verb agreement.
The same intuition underlies Slobin’s operating principle for functors (Slobin 1985).
As stated by Sportiche (1988, p.429) the Adjunct Projection Principle “...is the analogue of the Projection Principle for predicate argument structure: an argument of some predicate is projected as a sister of that argument (because theta-marking requires sisterhood).”
That the child has done this is shown by the fact that there are practically no cases where an infinitive does not occupy the final position (4 cases out of 547 in S between 22 and 27 months).
Given that only finite forms show the person/number distinctions, one could imagine that the finiteness distinction may actually contribute to the acquisition of subject-verb agreement. The fact that raising the verb means realizing adjacency between it and its subject in the surface string may help the child to discover that they covary in a systematic way.
Additional evidence for the assumption that the positional properties of negation play a crucial role in the development of the finiteness distinction comes from the acquisition of French where we observe the same early, practically errorless, distinction between finite forms which raise to the left above negation, and non-finite forms that stay in their base position to the right (for details, see Weissenborn, Verrips & Berman 1989, Pierce 1989), i. e. (i) mange pa seats not vs.(ii) pas manger not (to) eat
For a similiar analysis see Pollock (1989).
In addition, the fact that the first modals emerge relatively late in S and (i. e. around 25-except for wollen (will)-and 27 months respectively) also speaks in favor of their not being treated differently from main verbs. In H, the first modal occurs at 24 months.
Extensions of regular verb inflections to modals like in the following example: (i) ich kanne drinsitzen M (from Clahsen 1986) (I can sit in it) (ii) weil ich nicht kanne H 30;28 (because I not can) are additional evidence to support this assumption.
An alternative way of accounting for these structures, namely by assuming deletion of a main verb in the VP, is excluded by the constraint that deletions have to be recoverable. I don’t see how this could be achieved in the present case. That is, I assume something along the lines of Emonds’ Designation Convention which allows for the deletion of closed class (i. e. syntactic) elements only (Emonds 1985).
Why this should be so is not discussed. A principled account of why children may lack scrambling has been proposed by Wexler (class lectures, IT 1990). Under his account, the lack of scrambling is related to the children’s limited capacity of chain formation, more specifically of A-chain formation, that is supposed to explain also other phenomena like the late development of verbal passives (Borer & Wexler 1987).
It cannot be for case reasons: the adjoined position the subject has moved to is an A-bar position. In addition, if we assume that case is assigned under canonical government, the subject in (38) is not canonically governed (i. e. right to left) by I, and thus does not receive case. This means that (38) would be ruled out as a violation of the case-filter.
But see note 27 for why (38) may have to be ruled out for independent reasons.
Examples of this type are rare. Clahsen gives one example. I found two in the S data.
This analysis only holds if we adopt with Clahsen a D-structure analysis for negation in which the negator is adjoined to VP (see note 7).
Grewendorf’s (1990) proposal for dealing with cases like (39–41) does not work either, because it too does not account for the subject/object asymmetry. Grewendorf proposes that the negator is base-generated in final position. He assumes that the child initially treats the neagator as an affix. The finite verb on its way to AGR via head-movement picks up the negator leaving the object behind. Obviously, the same should happen with the subject.
The same holds for a contrastive interpretation of’ nicht’.
This assumption holds whether or not one adopts an analysis that assumes a separate INFL-projection in German (Bayer 1990b).
I assume, following Sportiche (1988) and Koopman & Sportiche (1989), that tensed INFL is a raising category and that it assigns nominative case either structurally (via government) or via Spec-Head-agreement. The [Spec, I] position is an A-position (and theta-bar position). As argued by Koopman & Sportiche (1989), movement to [Spec, I] from a caseless position other than the VP-internal subject position would result in a violation of the SSC by crossing over the VP-intemal subject. The same holds for movement from a case-marked position if the trace counts as an anaphor. If it counts as a variable, it should be locally A-bar bound. But it would be locally A-bound by the element in the [Spec, I] position.
There are 53 questions of the type’ where is...’ in S up to 24 months. Other wh-pronouns emerge as follows
The same observation has been made by Wode (1971); see also Felix (1980); Mills (1985).
There is a marginal possibility for a finite verb to occur in sentence final position without an overt complementiser (Grewendorf 1988): (i) weil diese Person anzurühren Hans glaubt niemand wagen würde because this person to touch Hans believes nobody dare would (= because Hans believes that nobody would dare to touch this person) but this does not apply to the sentences discussed here.
Similar to English complement and relative clauses (i. e.’ he said (that) he would come’;’ the book (that) I like’).
Although V-2 sentences in embedded clauses with complementisers have been observed (Tracy et al. 1990). But it has to be pointed out that in weil-(’because’) clauses the target, too, tends to have V-2.
Müller (1990) found (23) and (24) frequently in her French-German bilingual subjects. This points to an influence of French, a non-V-2 language. The V-3 status of number of Müller’s examples is doubtful. Thus, sentences like her (44) hier der fährt here this (one) drives (58) da de(r) schreit there that (one) cries are grammatical in the target, exactly like the following sentences which differ from the preceding ones only in that the order of the preverbal elements has been inverted: (44’) der hier fährt this (one) here drives (58’) der da schreit that (one) there cries This shows that the two preverbal elements should be interpreted as forming one constituent. I assume that the deictic locative adverbs are base-generated as left or right sisters of N0.
See also Müller (1990) for French-German bilinguals. Non-inverted wh-questions have been reported by Wode (1971), Felix (1980), Tracy et al. (1990).
The case that is not relevant here is [-C,-I] which Rizzi suggests corresponds to the determiner and its projection, the DP.
This is consistent with the findings of Felix (1980). Contrary to Felix, we do not observe a subsequent stage of non-inverted main verb wh-questions.
The fact that the verbal head in wh-questions can only be realized by an auxiliary, a modal, or the dummy-verb do is characteristic of a’ residual’, V-2 language like English.
According to standard analysis of German, IPs have exclusively a phrase final head. Once this head is moved, the assumption is that we are dealing with a CP (see Schwarz & Vikner 1990). The structures represented here are compatible with the view that there may be a stage in the development of German in which an [I]-head precedes the VP without enforcing a C-projection (Tracy et al. 1990).
See Weissenborn, Roeper, & de Villiers (1991) for a discussion of the issues related to these default assumptions. Independent evidence for S-V-O as the default comes from comprehension studies in children and aphasics (Bates, MacWhinney, Devescovi, Natale & Venza, 1984; Caplan, D., C. Baker, & F. Dehout, 1985).
That agreement may not yet always be correct is not important in this context.
This dissociation between the wh-component and the case component is illustrated by the following example: (i) M: Wer macht alles sauber? S28:18 (who makes everything clean) S: Mein Zimmer (my room) where the child interprets a who-question as a what-question:’ What do you clean?’
An alternative analysis would be to treat the subject-NP not as part of the VP but as a vocative. Contextually this interpretation is adequate. The remaining structure can then again be treated as a bare VP.
See also Weissenborn (1988). Wevering (1990) reaches a similiar conclusion for Dutch.
The only pro-subjects German allows for are obligatory and optional expletive pros, e. g. in passives and with experiencer verbs as in: (i) Gestern wurde *es getanzt yesterday was it danced (ii) *(Es) wurde gestern getanzt it was yesterday danced (iii) Mir ist (es) kalt (to) me is (it) cold One would expect that the acquisition of these regularities in the case of passive (i–ii) follows from general principles (see Cardinaletti (1990a) and Tomaselli (1990) for a discussion of expletive pro), whereas in the case of experiencer verbs (iii), it may be lexically determined.
Clahsen (to appear) points out that about 5% of the embedded clauses in Rothweiler (1989) have no subject. Apart from the fact that this is only one type of the contexts in question, these sentences stem from 7 different children after they had acquired subject-verb agreement according to Clahsen’s criterion (i. e. productive use of 2nd pers. sing, ending -st), that is, they come from a developmental period that lies after the one I am concerned with. One would also like to know how these 5% are distributed over the different subjects. In order to evaluate the significance of these figures for assumptions concerning the form of the child’s grammar, they should be contrasted with the figures of the child’s omission of subjects in other contexts (see table 1). Differences of this degree point to principled differences in the child’s grammar.
Permer (1990) analyses data from the acquisition of Bernese Swiss as showing scrambling at the first stage of syntactic development.
We called this the “Unique Trigger Hypothesis”.
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Weissenborn, J. (1990). Functional Categories and Verb Movement: The Acquisition of German Syntax Reconsidered. In: Rothweiler, M. (eds) Spracherwerb und Grammatik. Linguistische Berichte, vol 3. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-14309-3_9
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