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Acquisition of an Adjunct Island inside There-Sentences
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- Authors
- Issue Date
- 2005
- Citation
- Journal of Cognitive Science, Vol.6 No.2, pp. 73-95
- Keywords
- first language acquisition ; wh-movement ; adjunct island condition ; there-existential sentences ; participial codas ; phonologically covert islands ; relative clauses ; small clauses ; why-questions ; howquestions
- 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.
- ISSN
- 1598-2327
- Language
- English
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