Andrew Radford

The Syntax of Questions in Child English.

The purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary Government-and-Binding (GB) reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima & Bellugis classic 1966 work on the acquisition of interrogatives. I argue that the central insight of K&Bs paper can be captured by positing that wh-questions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head complementizer (C) position within the Complementizer Phrase (CP) (so blocking auxiliary inversion if this involves positioning an inverted auxiliary in C) and that in the transition to Adult English, children come to learn that wh-questions involve a wh-phrase superficially positioned in the specifier position within CP. I argue that the wh-in-C analysis poses both developmental problems (in that it fails to account for child structures involving a preposed wh-phrase with an uninverted auxiliary) and potential theoretical problems (in that long movement of a wh-head may violate locality principles). I then consider two alternative accounts of wh-questions which posit that wh-movement involves movement of a wh-phrase from the very earliest stages of development. The first of these is an adjunction account, on which wh-phrases are analysed as clausal adjuncts in Child English (adjoined to the Verb Phrase (VP) in the earliest stages and to the Inflection Phrase (IP) in later stages). I note, however, that this provides no principled account of the absence of auxiliary inversion in child wh-questions, and poses continuity problems (especially within a framework such as that of Cinque (1990) in which it is assumed that wh-phrases never adjoin to VP or IP). Finally, I consider an alternative account on which initial wh-phrases are analysed as occupying the specifier position within CP at all stages of development. I note that the problem posed by this analysis is accounting for the absence of auxiliary inversion in early wh-questions, and offer an account which posits that children overgeneralize specifier-head agreement from IP to CP.

Deconstructing the subject condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Abstract Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are interesting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In this paper we argue that the islandhood of subject DPs in both English and Spanish is not categorical. The degradation associated with extraction from subjects must be attributed to the interplay of a range of more general constraints which are not specific to subjects. We argue that the interaction of these constraints has a cumulative effect whereby the more constraints that are violated, the higher the degree of degradation that results. We also argue that some speakers have a greater tolerance for constraint violations than others, which would account for widespread inter-speaker judgment variability.

Concord, convergence and accommodation in bilingual children

This paper examines the syntax of GENDER CONCORD in mixed utterances where bilingual children switch between a modifier in one language and a noun in another. Particular attention is paid to how children deal with potential gender mismatches between modifier and noun, i.e., if one of the languages has grammatical gender but the other does not, or if one of the languages has a ternary gender system and the other a binary one. We show that the English–Italian and French–German bilingual children in our study accommodate the gender properties of the noun to those of its modifiers in such cases, in order to ensure convergence.

Genitive subjects in child English

This chapter provides an analysis of childrens so-called ‘genitive subjects’ (like my in My want one) within the framework of Principles and Parameters Theory. Child clauses with genitive subjects have been argued to have a very different syntactic structure from their adult counterparts, viz. to be nominal rather than clausal, or VPs rather than IPs, or projections of an underspecified (rather than a fully specified) INFL. I argue that the distribution of childrens genitive subjects shows conclusively that the structures containing them are clauses rather than nominals. I go on to challenge the traditional analysis of her/my/our/its subjects as genitive pronouns, arguing instead that her subjects are objective, my/its subjects function as strong nominative pronouns for the children who use them, and that our subjects result from a lexical gap in the childs pronoun paradigm. I conclude that there is no evidence that English children go through a genitive subjects stage, and hence no evidence that the grammars developed by two- and three-year old children are radically different from their adult counterparts.

Preposition copying and pruning in present-day English

This article investigates the nature of preposition copying and preposition pruning structures in present-day English. We begin by illustrating the two phenomena and consider how they might be accounted for in syntactic terms, and go on to explore the possibility that preposition copying and pruning arise for processing reasons. We then report on two acceptability judgement experiments examining the extent to which native speakers of English are sensitive to these types of ‘error’ in language comprehension. Our results indicate that preposition copying creates redundancy rather than ungrammaticality, whereas preposition pruning creates processing problems for comprehenders that may render it unacceptable in timed (but not necessarily in untimed) judgement tasks. Our findings furthermore illustrate the usefulness of combining corpus studies and experimentally elicited data for gaining a clearer picture of usage and acceptability, and the potential benefits of examining syntactic phenomena from both a theoretical and a processing perspective.

Lexical processing and the mental lexicon

An adult native speaker of English with a normal speech rate produces more than 150 words per minute – on average, more than one word every half second. Indeed, under time pressure, for example, when you are calling your friend in New Zealand from a public telephone in Britain or the United States, a native speaker can produce one word every 200 ms, which is less than a quarter of a second, and your friend can still understand what you are saying. The lexicon of an average native speaker of English contains about 30,000 words. This means that in fluent speech you have to choose continuously from these 30,000 alternatives, not just once, but two to five times per second, and there is no clear limit on how long you can indulge in this process. Furthermore, your friend is recognising your words at the same rate at the other end of the telephone line. If you wanted to, and had enough money, you could make the telephone companies happy by talking to your New Zealand friend for hours, with a decision rate of one word every 200–400 ms. Incredibly, despite the high speed of lexical processing, errors in the production and comprehension of words are very rare. Research has revealed that in a corpus of 200,000 words, getting on for twice the length of this book, only 86 lexical errors were found, i.e., fewer than 1 in every 2,000 words.

An Introduction to English Sentence Structure by Andrew Radford

1. Grammar 2. Structure 3. Null constituents 4. Head movement 5. Wh-movement 6. A-movement 7. Agreement, case and movement 8. Split projections 9. Phases.

Principles and parameters

Overview The aim of this chapter is to outline contemporary ideas on the nature of grammar and the acquisition of grammar . The approach adopted here is that associated with the principles-and-parameters model developed by Noam Chomsky during the 1980s and 1990s, in works ranging from his 1981 book Lectures on Government and Binding to his 1995c book The Minimalist Program . Grammar Grammar is traditionally subdivided into two different but inter-related areas of study – morphology and syntax . Morphology is the study of how words are formed out of smaller units (traditionally called morphemes ), and so addresses questions such as ‘What are the various component parts (= morphemes) of a word like antidisestablishmentarianism , and what kinds of principles determine the ways in which the parts are combined together to form the whole?’ Syntax is concerned with the ways in which words can be combined together to form phrases and sentences, and so addresses questions like ‘Why is it OK in English to say Who did you see Mary with? , but not OK to say * Who did you see Mary and? ’ (A star in front of an expression means that its ungrammatical.) ‘What kinds of principles determine the ways in which we can and cannot combine words together to form phrases and sentences?’ However, grammar is traditionally concerned not just with the principles which determine the formation of words, phrases and sentences, but also with the principles which govern their interpretation – i.e. with the principles which tell us how to interpret (= assign meaning to) words, phrases and sentences.