The Acquisition of Verb Placement: Functional Categories and V2 Phenomena in Language Acquisition

454 Pages·1992·16.98 MB·English

by  Jürgen M. Meisel (auth.)

THE ACQUISITION OF VERB PLACEMENT
STUDIES IN THEORETICAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
VOLUME 16
Managing Editors
Thomas Roeper, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Kenneth Wexler, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Editorial Board
Robert Berwick, Artificallntelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Manfred Bierwisch, Zentralinstitut fiir Sprachwissenschaft, Akademie del'
Wissenschaften, Berlin
Merrill Garrett, University of Arizona, Tucson
Lila Gleitman, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
Mary-Louise Kean, University of California at Irvine
Howard Lasnik, University of Connecticut at Storrs
John Marshall, Neuropsychology Unit, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford
Daniel Osherson, M.l.T., Cambridge, Mass.
Yukio Otsu, Keio University, Tokyo
Edwin Williams, Princeton University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
THE ACQUISITION
OF VERB PLACEMENT
Functional Categories and V2 Phenomena
in Language Acquisition
Edited by
JURGEN M. MEISEL
Romonisches Seminor, U"iversitat Hamburg, Hamburg. GermollY
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The acquisition of verb placement functional categories and V2
phenomena in language acquisition I edited by Jurgen M. Meisel.
p. cm. -- (Studies 1n theoretical psycholinguistics ; v. 16)
Inc 1 udes index.
ISBN 978-94-010-5245-0 ISBN 978-94-011-2803-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-2803-2
1. Language acquisition. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general
-Verb. 3. Functionalism (Linguistics) 1. Meisel, Jurgen M.
II. Series.
P11S.A144 1992
401' .93--dc20 92-23956
ISBN 978-94-010-5245-0
AII Rights Reserved
© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1992
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
JURGEN M. MEISEL I Introduction: Functional Categories and
Verb Placement in Language Development 1
ANDREW RADFORD I The Acquisition of the Morphosyntax of
Finite Verbs in English 23
CHRISTER PLA TZACK I Functional Categories and Early
S~~ ~
KA THERINE DEMUTH I Accessing Functional Categories in
Sesotho: Interactions at the Morpho-Syntax Interface 83
JURGEN M. MEISEL AND NATASCHA MULLER / Finiteness
and Verb Placement in Early Child Grammars: Evidence from
Simultaneous Acquisition of French and German in Bilinguals 109
IRA GAW LITZEK-MAIW ALD. ROSEMARIE TRACY AND
AGNES FRITZENSCHAFT / Language Acquisition and
Competing Linguistic Representations: the Child as Arbiter 139
HARALD CLAHSEN and MARTINA PENKE / The Acquisition
of Agreement Morphology and its Syntactic Consequences: New
Evidence on German Child Language from the Simone-Corpus 181
LYNN EUBANK I Verb Movement. Agreemen~ and Tense in L2
Acquisition 225
ZVI PENNER / The Ban on Parameter Resetting. Default
Mechanisms, and the Acquisition of V2 in Bemese Swiss
German 245
MAAIKE VERRIPS and JURGEN WEISSENBORN / Routes to
Verb Placenment in Early German and French: The Independence
of Finiteness and Agreement 283
THOMAS ROEPER I From the Initial State to V2: Acquisition
Principles in Action 333
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
NINA HYAMS / The Genesis of Clausal Structure 371
VIRGINIA V ALlAN / Categories of First Syntax: Be, Be+ing,
and Nothingness 401
JILL DE VILLIERS / On the Acquisition of Functional
Categories: A General Commentary 423
INDEX 445
JURGEN M. MEISEL
INTRODUCTION:
FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES AND
VERB PLACEMENT IN LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT
1. UG AND FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES
Research investigating the development of early linguistic knowledge has
been stimulated enonnously, during the past decade, by recent versions of
Generative Grammar. The Principles-and-Parameters framework of the
theory of Universal Grammar (UG), as developed by Chomsky (1981) and
others, has proved to be particularly useful for studies dealing with
grammatical development. It allows for the fonnulation of more specific
hypotheses than were possible in earlier models about what will be constant
and what may be expected to vary in the course of language acquisition or
of language change in history; see the papers in Roeper and Williams (eds.)
(1987) and, more recently, the work by Lightfoot (1991) for examples
illustrating this point.
UG is understood in this approach as a crucial component of the
language acquisition device. This implies, most importantly, that a
developing grammatical system, at each stage of the process of change,
only contains structures and mechanisms which do not violate the principles
of UG. In other words, the relevance of grammatical theory for language
acquisition studies - and vice versa - depends on the continuity assumption
(Pinker, 1984; see also White 1982). As Pinker (1984:7) states, "in the
absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, the child's grammatical
rules should be drawn from the same basic rule types, and be composed of
primitive symbols from the same class, as the grammatical rules attributed
to adults in standard linguistic investigations." Note that, contrary to what
one might suspect. assuming continuity does not necessarily commit one to
claiming that grammatical principles govern child language from the
moment when the child utters the first comprehensible word. Rather, it
allows for the possibility that there exists a "pregrammatical phase". Take.
Jiirgen M. Meisel (ed.), The Acquisition of Verb Placement, 1-21.
© 1992 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 JURGEN M. MEISEL
for example Bickerton's (1990a, 1990b) view, which represents perhaps the
strongest claims of this sort. He calls this early language use
"protolanguage" and argues (1990b:7) that "[ ... ] the child, up until time x, is
simply learning words and their associations, and beginning to string these
words together without any grammatical system whatsoever; in other words,
a child under two is doing pretty much the kinds of thing that 'language'
trained apes learn to do [. .. J". Sometime between ages 2;0 and 2;6, he
contends, grammar comes in abruptly and rapidly as a consequence of brain
maturation. As radical as such an approach may first appear to be, it is
easily reconciled with the continuity assumption. What matters is that both
models maintain that there is no stage of linguistic development during
which the child uses a kind of grammatical system different in nature from
the mature grammar.
If children's grammars are indeed composed of symbols, structures, and
rules of the same nature as those of adults, one wonders how to account for
the obvious differences between child and adult language. To a certain
extent, these may have to be explained as due to restrictions on immature
cognitive or processing systems. The present discussion, however, is
focused on the role of grammar. And this is where the distinction which is
made in grammatical theory between phenomena related to non
parameterized universal principles and those that depend on parameters of
UG or on language-specific properties of grammar becomes relevant. Only
in the case of non-parameterized principles will the continuity assumption
predict that they are invariably present in child as well as in adult
grammars. Concerning phenomena that depend on language-specific
properties, UG and the continuity assumption quite obviously have nothing
to say. Thus, the most interesting properties of grammar, from an
acquisitional perspective, are clearly the parameterized principles of UG,
for children need to find out how the values of the parameters are set in the
language(s) they are acquiring. Since UG allows for different solutions in
these cases, one can, in fact, expect children to explore the range of varia
tion defined by parameterized options of UG, precisely because these
choices are not detennined a priori but have to be made on the basis of in
fonnation available in the input. If Borer (1984) and Chomsky (1989) are
correct. parameters relate primarily to the non-substantive elements of the
lexicon, that is, functional elements like INFL, COMP, DET, and so forth.
It should therefore be particularly fascinating to study the development of
this type of category and also the effect such development may have on
INTRODUCTION 3
other aspects of developing grammars. And this is, indeed, what the
contributions to this volume do.
Parameterization of functional categories may, however, be understood
in different ways, even if one shares the dual assumptions that substantive
elements (verbs, nouns, etc.) are present in all grammars and that X-bar
principles are part of the grammatical knowledge available to the child prior
to language-specific learning processes. From these assumptions it follows
that the child should, from early on, be able to construct projections on the
basis of these elements. The role of functional categories, however, may
still be interpreted differently. One possibility, first suggested by Radford
(1986, 1990) and by Guilfoyle and Noonan (1988), is that children must
discover which functional categories (FC) need to be implemented in the
grammar of the language they are acquiring. Another possibility, first
explored by Hyams (1986), is that a specific category is present in
developing grammars but that parameter values are set in a way deviating
from the target adult grammar, corresponding, however, to options realized
in other adult systems. A third option would be that these categories might
be specified differently in developing as opposed to mature grammars. All
three are explored in the papers collected in this volume. Before outlining
the various hypotheses in more detail, however, I would like briefly to
sketch the grammatical context in which the following debate is situated.
2. I PAN D C PIN MAT U REG RAM MAR S
The discussions in the present volume are concerned mainly with the
categories C (or COMP) and I (or INFL) and their projections, since these
are the ones which may host moved elements (finite verbs, subjects,
topicalized constituents, as the like).
In earlier versions of generative grammar, all the necessary information
concerning tense, modality, and aspect (TMA), as well as information
necessary for subject-verb agreement was contained in a category AUX. In
more recent proposals, e.g. Chomsky (1986a), Rizzi (1987), and others, this
was captured in the double-headedness of INFL.
(1) INFL ~ (AGR) AUX
4 JORGEN M. MEISEL
In (1), AGR contains the so-called phi-features, that is, features for person,
number, and in some languages gender; see Chomsky (1982). AUX contains
at least tense (TNS or T), probably also aspect and modality. More recently
still, Pollock (1989), Chomsky (1989), and others developed the so-called
"split-INFL hypothesis", and in this hypothesis AGR is regarded as an
independent category, sometimes even as two different categories, AGRs
and AG~, referring to subject and object agreement, respectively; see
Chomsky (1989). T is either viewed as being contained in INFL, or as
representing another independent category. Some authors, however, sug
gest a category F (Finiteness), assuming that tensed clauses may be
regarded as finite entities. Note that, according to X-bar theory, each of
these categories heads its own maximal projection. Little has been said in
recent publications about modality and aspect.
What is important in the present context is that the "sentence" has
disappeared as a basic notion of grammar. Instead, sentences are now
understood as VPs (verb phrases) dominated by projections of the functional
categories INFL, AGR, COMP, and so forth. As a result, a simple sentence
structure, adhering to the more "conservative" version containing IP and
AgrP only, would look like (2) for SVO languages like English or like (3)
for SOY languages like German.
(2) CP
/"'-
Spec C'
/"'-.
C IP
/""-
Spec ./I ' "'-
I ./AgrP",,-
Spec }G~
AGR /VP"
Spec /V"
V NP