The Acquisition of Focus with Special Reference to the Syntax-Semantics Interface

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L1 research: We conducted a series of experiments to investigate young children's interpretation of the focus particles mo "also" and dake "only". It was observed that Japanese-speaking children gave similar response patterns to those reported in studies of the acquisition of English and German: they do not necessarily rely on syntactic information in their interpretation of sentences which contain a focus expression. Follow-up sessions revealed that children's non-adult response patterns are reversed depending on whether the focus particle is followed by a Case particle or not. Additional experiments were conducted to elicit the two opposite response patterns from the same child. Finally, we suggested that the subject-oriented response (the most frequent pattern for dake without a Case particle) is influenced by word order, based on an analysis of young Japanese children's spontaneous speech data. Syntactic research: We proposed the hypothesis that mo is a functional head with its focus target in the Spec position, while dake is merged to its target. In addition, we claimed that a derivational approach is most suitable to capture the distribution of focus expressions. Using this theoretical apparatus, we analyzed (1) the relationship between the lexical-semantic property of only and compositional semantics based on choice function binding and (2) the observation that a focus expression can avoid the intervention effect by scrambling. Finally, we argued that the structural relationship required for semantic interpretation of focus expressions is established at the overt level. We also considered the possibility of investigating children's acquisition of focus expressions within the Lexical Parameterization Hypothesis.