Acquisition of an Adjunct Island inside There-Sentences

Abstract

In the past two decades, how children acquire adjunct island constraints has been a focal topic of research in language development (e.g., Otsu 1981, Crain and Fodor 1984, Goodluck et al. 1992, de Villiers et al. 1990, Adul-Karim 2000). Previous studies are concerned primarily with childrens sensitivity to extraction from adjunct islands with a phonologically overt marker such as a relative pronoun (e.g., which, who) and a temporal complementizer (e.g., when, after) (see, among others, Otsu 1981, Goodluck et al. 1992). The present study examines childrens knowledge of the Adjunct Island Constraint which is at work in a phonologically covert syntactic environment, namely, there-sentences with participial codas (e.g., *How was there a boy running?). A crosssectional experiment was conducted with 14 monolingual Englishspeaking children ages from 3 to 6, and also with 24 adult native speakers of English. The results show that participial codas constitute strong barriers both in child and adult grammars, lending support to the syntactic analyses that treat participial codas as adjunct islands (e.g., McNally 1997, Chomsky 2001), as opposed to predicates that are parts of small clauses (e.g., Stowell 1978, 1981). Another interesting finding is that younger children tend to give why interpretations to how questions. I offer a way of accounting for this phenomenon by pointing to the semantic versatility of how and its distributional parallel to why.