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).