Download SUBJECT-AUXILIARY INVERSION IN CHILD ENGLISH REVISITED

SUBJECT-AUXILIARY INVERSION IN CHILD ENGLISH
REVISITED
KOJI SUGISAKI
Department of Humanities, Mie University
Tsu, Mie, 514-8507, Japan
1. Introduction
Within the principles-and-parameters framework, investigations into children’s
acquisition of “subject-auxiliary inversion” phenomena in English (as in Can
smart eagles swim?; Chomsky 1968) have played a prominent role in providing
evidence that a biologically predetermined “Universal Grammar” constrains the
course of acquisition from the earliest observable stages. For example, Crain &
Nakayama (1987) demonstrated that the grammar of English-speaking
preschool children is structure-dependent by showing experimentally that these
children rely on structural closeness (rather than linear closeness) when locating
the auxiliary that moves to the sentence-initial position.
Pursuing this line of acquisition research further, within the current
Minimalist framework, this study investigates whether children acquiring
English produce any incorrect yes/no-questions in which the most prominent
element in the subject noun phrase undergoes inversion (as in (1b)). The results
of this study show that children are adult-like from the very beginning in
excluding sentences like (1b), which in turn suggests that the subject originates
within a vP-internal position even in the grammar of very young children.
(1) a. Can smart eagles swim?
b. * Eagles smart can swim?
2. New Puzzle in the Subject-Aux Inversion and the Simplest Answer
Addressing the “subject-auxiliary inversion” in English within the Minimalist
framework, Chomsky (2010a,b) argues that there is an issue which “we should
be puzzled about but nobody has been puzzled about” in the formation of
yes/no-questions: Why is the Tense element raised to the C(omplementizer)
position (as in (1a)), not the nominal element in the subject noun phrase (as in
(1b))? Given the structure shown in (2a), this question can be reformulated as
follows: Why is the T element can regarded as structurally closer to the C
position than the nominal element eagles contained in the specifier position of
T?
(2) a. [ C [DP smart eagles ] [T′ canT swim ]]
b. [ C [TP canT [vP [DP smart eagles] swim ]]
Chomsky (2010a,b) proposes arguably the simplest answer: The subject
noun phrase is not there when the relation between C and T is established. This
analysis builds on the so-called predicate-internal subject hypothesis (e.g.
Kitagawa 1986, Kuroda 1988, Koopman & Sportiche 1991), in which the
subject originates inside the verb phrase (as in (2b)) and subsequently moves to
the specifier position of T. Thus, according to Chomsky (2010a,b), the
ungrammaticality of (1b) constitutes a strong argument for the assumption that
thematic subjects are base-generated within the verb phrase (see also Kitahara
2011).
3. Transcript Analysis
In order to determine whether English-learning children produce incorrect
yes/no-questions of the sort illustrated in (1b), I examined longitudinal corpora
for English from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). The spontaneous
speech data from three children (Adam Eve, and Sarah; Brown 1973) have been
analyzed so far, which provided a total sample of more than 94,000 lines of
child speech. The CLAN program KWAL was used to identify all the potential
questions (the sentences that end with “?”), which were then searched by hand
and checked against the original transcripts to locate the errors that correspond
to the example in (1b).
The results are summarized in Table 1. Even though children produced
both (i) inverted yes/no-questions with a “simple” subject (the subject which
consists of a single word, like “Can I eat an apple?”), and (ii) inverted yes/noquestions with a “complex” subject (a subject which consists of more than a
single word, like “Can this pig eat an apple?”), no question with an incorrect
inversion was found in which a part of the “complex” subject noun phrase was
moved. Furthermore, an account in terms of the frequency of questions as in
(1a) in the adult input turned out to be quite difficult to maintain, because almost
all the yes/no-questions produced by adults were those with a “simple” subject,
and hence are superficially consistent with a rule like “Move the second element
of the sentence to the front”, which would yield questions as in (1b). Thus, if
Chomsky’s (2010a,b) analysis is on the right track, these results suggest that the
original position of the subject is within the verb phrase even in children’s
grammar, and that children’s yes/no-questions are formed through the
interaction between the simplest Merge and the structural closeness (which
should result from the third-factor principle of computational efficiency).
Table 1: The Number of Children’s Yes/No-questions
Correct questions
Correct questions
Child
with
with
a "simple" subject
a "complex" subject
Adam (2;03 1345
50
4;10)
Eve (1;06 34
0
2;03)
Sarah (2;03 570
17
5;01)
Incorrect questions
with
a "complex" subject
0
0
0
References
Brown, Roger. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1968. Language and mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
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Chomsky, Noam. 2010a. Poverty of stimulus: Unfinished business.
Transcription of oral presentation at Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz,
March 24, 2010. http://www.stiftung-jgsp.uni-mainz.de/Bilder_allgemein/
Mainz_transcript_edited.pdf
Chomsky, Noam. 2010b. Poverty of stimulus: Some unfinished business.
Lecture presented at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, May 29, 2010. (Video
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MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk.
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