INFL in Child and Adult Language: Agreement, Case and Licensing
C. T. Sch�tze, 1997
I propose an analysis of the inflectional system of clauses that captures both crosslinguistic variation and differences between adult speakers and young children learning a given language. The phenomena of interest fall into two classes: 1) case marking and subject-predicate agreement; and 2) tense marking and the licensing of overt and null subjects. The major goals are
* to motivate the complete separation of case and licensing;
* to argue that agreement is exclusively responsible for case, and tense
exclusively for (subject) licensing;
* to argue that children"s "root infinitive" utterances violate no principles of
syntax in either domain " rather, children differ from adults in their choices among convergent structures.
I argue that structure case marking is a reflex of the same syntactic feature-checking relation as agreement; I label this conglomeration Accord. The presence in a clause of features involved in Accord is not an absolute convergence requirement. Rather, it is due to a preference among convergent derivations, expressed as the Accord Maximization Principle (AMP), which compares structures that differ only on uninterpretable features (in the sense of Chomsky 1995). Among those that meet all convergence requirements, only those with the most Accord relations are admissible. Children do not always successfully enforce this preference, sometimes reverting to a representation where structural case features have not been introduced. When this happens, arguments appear in the default case of the language, supplied in the Spell-Out component. Evidence from child corpus studies (both normal and Specifically Language Impaired) shows that children know both that case and agreement must be checked together and that default case must be supplied when case is absent.
With regard to subject licensing, I show that the absence of Tense features is often compatible with both PRO and overt subjects. Children"s overt subjects of nonfinite clauses are thus consistent with adult grammars. The relationship between the distribution of syntactic Tense features and the meanings of clauses is governed by interface conditions on which adults and children apparently differ.
Thesis supervisor: Alec Marantz, Kenneth N. Wexler
Titles: Professor of Linguistics, Professor of Psychology and Linguistics
Table of Contents
1 Introduction 12
1.1 Issues and goals 12
1.2 Approach to acquisition 13
1.3 Organization of the thesis 17
2 Theoretical Framework 20
2.1 Licensing 20
2.1.1 The empirical domain 22
2.1.2 Subjects of nonfinite clauses 23
2.1.3 The distribution of PRO 31
2.2 Case 36
2.3 Agreement and varieties of case 40
2.4 Why separate case and licensing? 45
2.5 Syntax and morphology 49
2.6 The necessity of default case: An English case study 52
Appendix 2.A: Adjunct subject licensing and with 62
Appendix 2.B: Subject of nonfinite clauses in other languages 65
3 Background on Acquisition 68
3.1 Interpreting the OI/EOI stage 68
3.1.1 Theories of optional infinitives 68
3.1.2 Theories of SLI 72
3.1.3 Theories of null subjects and licensing in acquisition 73
3.1.4 Theories of case acquisition 76
3.2 Syntax-morphology interaction in acquisition 77
3.2.1 Importance of the inventory 77
3.2.2 Acquiring the default case 79
3.2.2.1 Motivation 79
3.2.2.2 Crosslinguistic differences 81
3.2.2.3 Left dislocations 84
3.2.2.4 Predicate nominals 86
3.3 Interpreting the data 91
3.4 Details of data analysis 94
4 Agreement and Case 100
4.1 Agreement and structural case: two sides of one coin 100
4.1.1 Icelandic 101
4.1.1.1 NOM and agreement 102
4.1.1.2 NOM and infinitives 103
4.1.1.3 Infinitival subjects 110
4.1.1.4 Implementing the Accord Maximization Principle 113
4.1.1.5 NOM ECM and a constraint on NOM objects 115
4.1.1.6 Interactions with binding 118
4.1.1.7 Passive participle Accord versus Concord 121
4.1.2 Hindi 124
4.1.3 Portuguese 125
4.1.4 Modern Greek 128
4.1.5 Belfast English 131
4.1.6 Standard English 136
4.1.7 Object Accord 140
4.1.7.1 Romance 140
4.1.7.2 Inuit 141
4.1.7.3 Choctaw 141
4.2 Structural versus inherent case as presence versus absence of
Accord 145
4.3 Choices between structural cases 155
4.4 Implementing case in the morphology 161
Appendix 4.A: Korean "Case Stacking" isn"t 164
4.A.1 Introduction 164
4.A.2 Against case stacking 165
4.A.3 In favor of a focus treatment 167
4.A.4 Distribution of ka and lul stacking 170
4.A.4.1 Stacked lul also isn"t case 170
4.A.4.2 Choice of ka versus lul stacking 172
4.A.4.3 Analysis 173
4.A.5 Extension to related constructions 175
4.A.5.1 The "ECM" construction 175
4.A.5.2 "Multiple Case" constructions 177
4.A.6 DP subjects versus PP subjects 179
4.A.6.1 DAT can be a case morpheme 180
4.A.6.2 True PP subjects get (obligatory) NOM case 180
4.A.7 Conclusions 181
Appendix 4.B: Some split ergative systems 184
4.B.1 Basic case/agreement splits 184
4.B.2 Georgian 185
5 The acquisition of INFL: case, agreement and tense 188
5.1 Introduction 188
5.2 INFL forms and features: An English case study 190
5.2.1 Null be 190
5.2.2 Nodes and features 200
5.2.3 Paradigms: V-raising and morphological merger 204
5.2.4 Vocabulary entries 209
5.2.5 Implications for child English 213
5.2.6 Summary 216
5.3 Patterns of child case errors 216
5.3.1 English 216
5.3.1.1 Normal children"s production 216
5.3.1.1.1 Previous findings 216
5.3.1.1.2 New corpus data 223
5.3.1.1.3 Summary of data and implications 230
5.3.1.1.4 Analysis 231
5.3.1.2 SLI children"s production 237
5.3.1.2.1 Previous findings 237
5.3.1.2.2 New data 238
5.3.1.3 Experiment in progress 242
5.3.2 German 244
5.3.2.1 Previous findings 244
5.3.2.2 New data 245
5.3.2.3 Analysis 246
5.3.3 Dutch 246
5.3.4 Russian 249
5.3.5 French 250
5.4 Advantages over other theories of case acquisition and OIs 254
5.5 Other predictions of the two-factor OI theory 261
5.5.1 Time course 261
5.5.2 Null subjects 263
6 Open questions and future directions 272
6.1 Open questions about adult grammars 272
6.2 Open questions about acquisition 273
6.2.1 Descriptive questions 273
6.2.2 Issues for learning 275
6.2.3 Semantic implications of the analysis of child clause types 277
6.3 Comparisons among derivations in child and adult grammars 280