Dana McDaniel

Partial and multiple Wh-movement

This paper deals with two types of Wh-constructions that occur in German and Romani: partial and multiple Wh-movement. In these constructions a Wh-phrase moves to the specifier of a CP that is lower than the CP over which the Wh-phrase takes scope. In partial Wh-movement, the scope position contains a scope-marker, and in multiple Wh-movement, the scope position contains another Wh-phrase. Both constructions are restricted by a Subjacency-like constraint. It is argued that the data can be accounted for by considering Subjacency to be a condition on representation. In addition, it is claimed that Absorption applies at S-structure, as well as LF, in these languages, whereas in languages like English, it applies only at LF. The possibility of S-structure Absorption unifies partial and multiple Wh-movement and accounts for their existence in a language.

Methods for assessing children's syntax

Part 1 Production data: collecting spontaneous production data, Katherine Demuth analyzing childrens spontaneous speech, Karin Stromswold what children know about what they say - elicited imitation as a research method for assessing childrens syntax, Barbara Lust et al elicited production, Rosalind Thornton. Part 2 Comprehension data: the intermodal preferential looking paradigm - a window onto emerging language comprehension, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff the picture selection task, LouAnn Gerken and Michele E. Shady the act-out task, Helen Goodluck questions after stories - on supplying context and eliminating it as a variable, Jill de Villiers and Thomas Roeper on-line methods, Cecile McKee. Part 3 Judgement data: the truth-value judgement task, Peter Gordon eliciting judgements of grammaticality and reference, Dana McDaniel and Helen Smith Cairns. Part 4 General issues: crosslinguistic investigation, Celia Jakubowicz assessing morphosyntax in clinical settings, Laurence B. Leonard issues in designing research and evaluating data pertaining to childrens syntactic knowledge, Jennifer Ryan Hsu and Louis Michael Hsu.

Relatives Children Say

In an experiment designed to elicit restrictive relatives clauses, 28 children ranging in age from 2:2 to 3:10 provided a corpus of communicatively appropriate relative clauses. In evaluating this corpus, we found that most children produced mostly adult relative clauses most of the time. Detailed study of these utterances uncovered a few error patterns, which we analyzed in light of several considerations (e.g., the overall frequency of an error type, its distribution across children and items, its relation to the construction under study, and the similarity of the error to what children do elsewhere). Only one error pattern, namely some childrens production of inappropriate relative pronouns, is argued to reflect a systematic feature of language development. We conclude that childrens ability to represent the syntactic structure of the embedded clause is on target very early.

PARAMETERS FOR WH-MOVEMENT TYPES: EVIDENCE FROM CHILD ENGLISH*

In this paper we report on a longitudinal study investigating Wh-constructions in children ranging initially from 2;11 to 5;7. We found that, in addition to accepting English-type Wh-movement, some children, for a period of time, also acceptpartial Wh-movement, Wh-copying, andmultiple Wh-movement, constructions that exist in languages like German and Romani, in which a Wh-phrase occurs in a [-Wh] SpecCP. Importantly, none of the children who accept these construction types manifest the That-Trace Effect. To account for this correlation, we propose an analysis whereby grammars allowing the Wh-constructions do not have the [pred] feature of Rizzi (1990) that distinguishes the specifier of relative clauses from other SpecCPs. We suggest that children are born with their parameter set in this way and later, if they are learning a language like English, switch to a grammar that includes the [pred] feature.

Experimental evidence for a minimalist account of English resumptive pronouns

In this article we provide evidence for a Minimalist account of English-type resumptive pronouns. Our findings provide empirical support for syntactic theories that, like Minimalist accounts, allow for competition among derivations. According to our account, resumptive pronouns are spell-outs of traces. For reasons of economy, the resumptive pronoun surfaces only when the derivation with the trace is precluded by syntactic principles. This account predicts that resumptive pronouns should only improve violations of constraints on representation, and not violations of constraints on movement. We tested this prediction by conducting an acceptability judgment task with 36 native speakers of English. The results bore out our prediction; subjects preferred the resumptive pronoun over the trace in cases where the trace itself was illicit, but not in cases where only the movement operation was illicit.

Development of a Metalinguistic Skill: Judging the Grammaticality of Sentences

Seventy-seven 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children were presented with well-formed and ill-formed versions of 10 different sentence types. They were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences and correct the ill-formed ones. The sentences were presented in an interview format, developed by McDaniel and Cairns (1990, 1996). Both grammaticality judgment and correction ability improved with age. It is argued that the ability to make grammaticality judgments and to correct ill-formed sentences reflects the childs developing ability to access syntactic knowledge consciously and to employ that knowledge in the processing of sentences.

Which Children Did They Show Obey Strong Crossover

This study examines children’s knowledge of strong crossover in two-clause sentences. The relevant constructions are illustrated in Types Ito IV below, where the intended interpretation of each question is indicated by indexing in the question. The answers provided correspond to the indexing in the question.

Multiple influences on children's language performance

Our commentary concerns the Competing Factors Model (CFM). As Drozd says, the CFM is fictitious and without proponents. (See also McDaniel, 2001.) But we will argue that something like it is necessary to our field. Everyone recognizes multiple influences on language performance, even C&T. Most important, recognizing these factors does not require a denial of the grammars existence or even of its dominance.

What’s Thats?

It is the divergence from the standard that we address in this paper. We will follow Seppänen and Kjellmer’s (1995) lead in further documenting the occurrence of thats in American English, and we will consider in more detail hypotheses about its syntax. We will also present new data from experimental investigations of the thats construction. These data reveal two important patterns: first, thats is accepted more in the east of the United States than in the west; second, its acceptance is both more widespread and more systematic among children than among adults. We will argue, based on these patterns, that American English is beginning to allow the thats construction. Seppänen and Kjellmer discuss the genitive thats diachronically and consider geographic trends in its current occurrence. Their general claim is that thats is making its way into standard English usage. They note that while it is unacceptable in all forms of written English, it can be found in texts describing the colloquial English of Ireland, Scotland, and parts of Northern England. In a small supplemental survey, they also found that speakers of American English accepted the genitive thats. Importantly, they explain the usage of thats as filling a gap in the English language. The inanimate wh-form in English is which, but which has no genitive counterpart *whichs. Speakers of English generally find whose unnatural with inanimates in sentences like (3).