Parameters in Root Infinitives: A Study in Comparative Syntax and Acquisition

小孩子是如何获得语言系统的？有人认为，儿童经历了根不定式（模拟）阶段，在这个阶段，时态缺失，没有T和c相关的项目出现在自然的生产中。基于纵向研究和语料库分析，我们认为说日语的儿童和学习其他语言的儿童一样，也会经历时态缺失的阶段，这一阶段可以用Rizzi（1993/1994）提出的截断假说（Truncation Hypothesis）来解释。我们进一步认为，在儿童语言中有三种类型的根不定式（类似物）：根不定式（荷兰语、法语、德语等），裸动词（英语、斯瓦希里语、日语的拟声词等）和代理不定式（日语、韩语、土耳其语、科威特阿拉伯语等）。对词根不定式（类似物）现象的跨语言分析为儿童语言的普遍性和可能的差异性提供了有力的证据。

How do the very young childrren acquire the verbal system? It has been argued that children go through the Root Infinitive (analogue) stage where tense is missing and no T- and C-related items appear in the natural production. We argue based on the longitudinal studies and corpus analysis that Japanese-speaking children, just like children learning other languages, go through the stage where tense is missing, and the stage can be well explained by the Truncation Hypothesis proposed by Rizzi (1993/1994).We further argue that there are three types of Root Infinitive (anaoogues) in the child languages: Root Infinitives (Dutch, French, German, among others), Bare Verbs (English, Swahili, Japanese onomatopoeia among others) and Surrogate Infinitives (Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Kuwaiti Arabic, among others).The cross-linguistic analysis of the Root Infinitive (anaogues) phenomenon provides us a piece of strong evidence for the universality and the possible variations in child language.