Generative Linguistics and Acquisition: Studies in honor of Nina M. Hyams

365 Pages·2013·2.17 MB·English

by  Misha Becker

Generative Linguistics and Acquisition
Language Acquisition and Language Disorders
(LALD)
Volumes in this series provide a forum for research contributing to theories of
language acquisition (first and second, child and adult), language learnability,
language attrition and language disorders.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/lald
Series Editors
Harald Clahsen Lydia White
University of Potsdam McGill University
Editorial Board
Kamil Ud Deen Mabel Rice
University of Hawaii at Manoa University of Kansas
Katherine Demuth Luigi Rizzi
Macquarie University University of Siena
Naama Friedmann Petra Schulz
Tel Aviv University Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität
Heather Goad Bonnie D. Schwartz
McGill University University of Hawaii at Manoa
Barbara Höhle Antonella Sorace
University of Potsdam University of Edinburgh
Nina Hyams Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
University of California at Los Angeles Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Jürgen M. Meisel
University of Calgary
Volume 54
Generative Linguistics and Acquisition. Studies in honor of Nina M. Hyams
Edited by Misha Becker, John Grinstead and Jason Rothman
Generative Linguistics
and Acquisition
Studies in honor of Nina M. Hyams
Edited by
Misha Becker
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
John Grinstead
The Ohio State University, Columbus
Jason Rothman
University of Florida, Gainesville
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Generative linguistics and acquisition : studies in honor of Nina M. Hyams / Edited by
Misha Becker, John Grinstead, Jason Rothman.
p. cm. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, issn 0925-0123 ; v. 54)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Generative grammar. 2. Language acquisition. 3. English language--Acquisition.
I. Hyams, Nina M., 1952- honouree. II. Becker, Misha Karen, 1973- editor of
compilation. III. Grinstead, John, editor of compilation. IV. Rothman, Jason,
editor of compilation.
P158.G44 2013
410--dc23 2012049214
isbn 978 90 272 5316 3 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7226 3 (Eb)
© 2013 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction 1
Misha Becker, John Grinstead & Jason Rothman
part i. Argument structure and clause-internal syntax in children
Animacy, argument structure and unaccusatives in child English 13
Misha Becker & Jeannette Schaeffer
Remarks on theoretical accounts of Japanese children’s passive acquisition 35
Tetsuya Sano
Early or late acquisition of inflected infinitives in European Portuguese?
Evidence from spontaneous production data 65
Ana Lúcia Santos, Jason Rothman, Acrisio Pires & Inês Duarte
The relationship between determiner omission and root infinitives
in child English 89
Carson Schütze
The semantics of the tense deficit in child Spanish SLI 107
John Grinstead, Dan McCurley, Teresa Pratt,
Patrick Obregon & Blanca Flores
part ii. The DP domain
The acquisition of reflexives and pronouns by Faroese children 131
Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir
Pronouns vs. definite descriptions 157
Kyle Johnson
An L2 study on the production of stress patterns in English compounds 185
Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, Xiao He & Natalie Jonckheere
The syntactic domain of content 205
Hagit Borer
part iii. Learning theory
There-insertion: How Internal Merge guides the acquisition path 251
Tom Roeper
i Table of contents
Metalinguistic skills of children 271
Helen Smith Cairns
Children’s Grammatical Conservatism: New evidence 291
Koji Sugisaki & William Snyder
Contributing to linguistic theory, language description and the characterization
of language development through experimental studies 309
Adriana Belletti
A new theory of null-subjects of finite verbs in young children:
Information-structure meets phasal computation 325
Ken Wexler
Index 357
Introduction
Misha Becker, John Grinstead & Jason Rothman
It is no overstatement to say that Nina Hyams’ research has transformed the field of
child language acquisition. At the time she wrote her dissertation (in 1983; it was
published in 1986) there existed already a rich literature on children’s language stem-
ming from the work of Roger Brown and his students and colleagues, including Ed
Klima, Ursula B ellugi, Dan Slobin, as well as Melissa Bowerman, Lila Gleitman, Jill
De Villiers and many others. But much of this work centered around describing the
developmental trajectory of children’s production and comprehension of language, or
accounting for developmental shifts in terms of general cognitive development. Hyams’
dissertation was the first attempt within the Government-Binding theory framework
to go beyond such approaches to explaining patterns of children’s syntax in terms of
what children assume about language innately, and what in the input could trigger
a change in their grammatical representation. Taking seriously the notion that con-
straints of Universal Grammar applied both to adult grammar and to child grammar,
Hyams applied the logic of the Principles and Parameters system to the phenomenon
of children’s null s ubjects in non-null subject languages like English. As Ken Wexler
comments in his contribution to this volume (Chapter 14), there was considerable
excitement over Hyams’ work, as it was evident that her approach to child language was
ground-b reaking. Indeed, not only did her dissertation have a significant impact on the
fields of syntactic theory and first language acquisition, it also profoundly influenced
research in second language acquisition (e.g. Clahsen & Muysken 1989; Flynn 1987;
Liceras 1986; Schwartz 1986, 1988; White 1989) and learnability theory (Clark 1992;
Gibson & Wexler 1994; Yang 2002, 2004), and is recognized even farther afield in books
and articles on cognitive psychology and development (e.g. Aitchison 2007; Anderson
2004). Many of these influences are evident in the contributions to this book.
What was so seismic about the shift brought about by Hyams’ dissertation was
that by viewing syntax acquisition as a matter of parameter setting (or resetting),
researchers could reframe the child’s hypotheses in terms of a fairly small number of
parameters and their (usually) binary options: Does my language have null or overt
subjects? Does my language have overt or covert wh-movement? Is my language head-
initial or head-final? Does my language have a verb-second requirement? This recasting
of the child’s hypotheses into a limited set of options both made the learning problem
2 Misha Becker, John Grinstead & Jason Rothman
more tractable and allowed researchers to draw associations between otherwise appar-
ently unrelated phenomena. For example, Hyams and Wexler (1993) note the striking
patterns of correlation, across a wide range of languages, between children’s null sub-
ject stage and properties of their inflectional system. Although many researchers have
moved away from stating developmental shifts explicitly in terms of parameter-setting
(including Hyams herself), the parametric approach to syntax acquisition provided
an important framework for investigating the logical puzzles about language learning
and a crucial tie between adult syntactic theory and developmental inquiry (and see
Snyder 2007 and Chapter 12 of this volume for evidence of its continued relevance).
In the nearly 30 years since Hyams’ dissertation, the force of her work’s impact
upon the field has not abated. Through changes in the details of clausal architecture
(e.g. the proliferation of functional nodes in the IP domain, and later in the CP domain)
and broad shifts in syntactic theory (e.g. GB to Minimalism), the core of Hyams’
insight remains a driving force pushing the field forward: children are constrained by
the same universal constraints as adults, and child grammars can be accounted for in
terms of these deep properties of human language. The logical problem of language
acquisition is answerable by integrating evidence of children’s “errors” with what we
know about the machinery of adult grammar. This allows us to define the space of
children’s hypotheses and guides us in identifying their path to adult grammar.
Not only has Hyams’ seminal work been a defining moment in acquisition litera-
ture and research, but her work since then has continued to bring predictions from
adult syntactic theory to bear on child language data. In doing so her research has
touched on multiple subdomains within syntactic theory (e.g. clause structure, binding
theory, A-movement, inflection, modality) and just about every major issue that has
occupied generative acquisitionists during these decades: null subjects, Root/Optional
Infinitives, maturation, tense and aspect, DP structure. Her theoretical claims have
been supported by data from a number of different child languages, from Italian and
English to Greek, Dutch, Icelandic, French, and Malagasy. Thus, Hyams’ contributions
to the field are at once broad and deep.
The contributors and editors of this volume are a few of the people whose work
and lives have been touched and transformed by Nina and her legacy: we are her coau-
thors, colleagues, teachers, students and friends. The breadth of topics covered in this
volume is indicative of the far-reaching influence of Hyams’ work and the power of her
claims to spark lively debate. So much of what we have learned about language acquisi-
tion in the last 30 years can be traced back to Nina. In creating this tribute to her we
sought to highlight the diversity of her influence and to recognize her inspiration to
the field.
We have organized this book into three main sections, each of which represents
one main area of research that has been heavily influenced by Hyams’ work. The
first section comprises papers dedicated to exploring the architecture of children’s
Introduction 3
clauses, from A-movement (Becker & Schaeffer, Sano) to inflection (Santos et al.
Schütze) to tense/aspect marking (Grinstead et al.). The second section includes
papers specifically concerned with DPs. The first two papers in that section relate
to pronominals and the second two to compound nominals. Two of these papers
are related to language acquisition (Sigurjónsdóttir’s on first language, Zubizarreta
et al.’s on adult second language acquisition), while two are primarily about adult
grammar (Johnson, Borer), but with provocative questions for language acquisition.
Finally, the third section, Learnability Theory, contains papers that link studies of
children’s language to questions of learning triggers (Roeper, Wexler), theoretical
accounts of grammar ( Belletti, Sugisaki & Snyder) and metalinguistic knowledge
(Cairns). Below we provide a brief synopsis of each of the chapters.
Misha Becker and Jeannette Schaeffer’s paper, Animacy, argument structure and
unaccusatives in child English, presents arguments that English-acquiring children
correctly represent unaccusative constructions as unaccusatives, and not as unerga-
tives. Their claim is based primarily on the distribution of children’s unaccusative and
unergative verbs with animate and inanimate subjects. Unergative verbs generally
require animate subjects in adult language (The boy/#the book laughed), while unac-
cusatives readily admit inanimate subjects (The boy/the book arrived). Using data from
CHILDES, Becker and Schaeffer show that children respect these restrictions, using
unaccusative verbs with both animate and inanimate subjects about equally, but limit-
ing unergative verbs almost exclusively to animate subjects. Thus, they conclude that
young children correctly represent the lone argument of unaccusatives as an internal
argument, which raises to subject position via A-movement.
Tetsuya Sano, in Remarks on theoretical accounts of Japanese children’s pas-
sive acquisition, reports on two experiments of Japanese-speaking children’s com-
prehension of three different types of passive constructions and argues against
the A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (Borer & Wexler 1987, i.a.) as an explanation of
young children’s difficulty with the passive. Sano compares not only the long pas-
sive ( ni-phrase) with the short passive construction (no ni-phrase), but also the
long passive with what he calls the ‘passive-unaccusative amalgam’ construction,
which exhibits a passive interpretation of arguments but unaccusative (rather than
passive) morphology. Sano argues that both the passive (e.g. tukamaerareru ‘be
caught’) and the passive-unaccusative amalgam (e.g. tukamaru ‘be caught’), like the
short passive, involve an A-chain (he argues that short passives cannot be adjectival
in Japanese). However, Sano reports that by age 4 the children perform quite well
on the passive-unaccusative amalgam but continue to perform poorly on full pas-
sives, and by age 3 they are virtually at ceiling on short passive constructions. Hence
the relatively poorer performance on full passives cannot be due to the A-chain.
Instead, Sano argues that children’s difficulty is specifically with theta transmission,
in line with Fox and Grodzinsky (1998).