A Minimalist Account of Verbal Morphology in Child Grammar: Evidence from VP Ellipsis

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AbstractRosalind ThorntonProposal Number SBR-9905199"A Minimalist Account of Verbal Morphology in Child Grammar: Evidence from VP Ellipsis"According to the Minimalist Program, movement takes place within the syntactic/computational system only when needed to derive a representation that can be interpreted by the conceptual system (or one that is 'legible' to the phonetic/articulatory component). Interface conditions such as these make it highly unlikely for a sentence to yield more than a single convergent derivation. By contrast, empirical investigation of early child language has led to the view that children's early grammars are characterized by optional structural derivations. This view is at odds with the spirit of the Minimalist Program. One recalcitrant observation is that children younger than two and a half years old appear to vacillate between a derivation in which the verb is tensed (undergoing verb movement if the language requires it) and one in which the verb is a nonfinite (infinitival) form.The present project seeks a better fit between linguistic theory and investigations of child language. The research strategy involves searching for children's sensitivity to linguistic distinctions that have gone unnoticed or unexplained in previous investigations, using careful longitudinal experimentation over an extended period with a few young children. One distinction that is hypothesized to lie at the heart of the apparent optionality of verbal morphology in early child grammars is the semantic distinction between stage-level and individual-level predicates; individual-level predicates appear with verbal morphology, as finite forms, and stage-level predicates appear as non-finite (or infinitival forms). The suggestion is that this "pure" reflection of Universal Grammar in early child language is obscured, as language-specific processes such as verb movement are incorporated into the childs grammar. Another hypothesis to be investigated is that the apparent optionality of verbal morphology is overridden by syntactic processes, even during the so-called optional infinitive stage. One syntactic process that results in obligatory morphological marking of tense and possibly agreement is VP ellipsis, which is licensed only by "strong agreement" carried by an auxiliary verb. Childrens obligatory use of tense and agreement in VP ellipsis structures would challenge many current theoretical proposals which view optionality as the product of some sort of deficit or biologically-induced constraint of developing grammars. Positive findings from the present research could also inform the search for the triggering experiences that guide children in selecting the correct parameter settings for their target language. These and other hypotheses concerning VP ellipsis and type of predication will be tested in experiments using the methodology of elicited production, in addition to data from spontaneous production and from the CHILDES database.