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

根据句法文献，日语区别于英语或西班牙语等语言的主要特征之一是有论元省略。基于这一理论背景，本研究对说日语的学龄前儿童是否具有完全成人式的论元省略知识进行了实验研究。更具体地说，本研究通过实验来确定儿童是否遵守以下两个关于论元省略的限制：(A)WH-短语不能进行论元省略，(B)附加语不能省略。本研究的结果支持了Oku(1998)、Saito(2007)和Takahashi(2008)等人提出的参数建议，即论元省略在日语中的可用性与日语的其他显著特征密切相关，如杂乱无章或缺乏显性一致。本研究的一个更广泛的含义是，儿童语言习得为评估跨语言变异理论提供了重要的依据。

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.