A Cognitive Study on the Acquisition of Argument Ellipsis:The View from Child Japanese and Child English

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According to the syntactic literature, one of the major properties that distinguish Japanese from languages like English or Spanish is the availability of Argument Ellipsis. In light of this theoretical background, this study investigated experimentally whether Japanese-speaking preschool children have fully adult-like knowledge of Argument Ellipsis. More specifically, this study conducted experiments to determine whether children obey the following two constraints on Argument Ellipsis: (A) Wh-phrases cannot undergo Argument Ellipsis, (B) Adjuncts cannot be elided. The results of my experiments revealed that children conform to these constraints from the earliest observable stages.The findings of this study lend acquisitional support for the parametric proposals made by Oku (1998), Saito (2007), and Takahashi (2008) (among others) that the availability of Argument Ellipsis in Japanese is closely tied to other prominent characteristics of this language, such as scrambling or the absence of overt agreement. A broader implication of this study is that child language acquisition provides an important ground to evaluate theories of cross-linguistic variation.