Hagit Borer

The Maturation of Syntax

In recent years there has been a good deal of effort devoted to the problem of the development of linguistic representations. An active group of investigators is attempting to simultaneously figure out how linguistic representations can be attained given the limited data available to the child (the problem of learnability) and to understand why the course of development takes the actual form that it does. Needless to say, these problems interact. While concentration on both problems expands the goal of study, thereby making the ultimate solution more difficult to attain, the double concentration also has the effect of bringing a greater body of evidence to bear on the fundamental problem of the growth of language, thereby aiding in attempted solutions.

Bi-unique relations and the maturation of grammatical principles

The purpose of this paper is to argue for a maturational schedule in language development involving the gradual reformulation of UG-determined biunique relations. We investigate an early stage (about 2;0) in child Italian which shows object agreement with a participle for lexical objects, a phenomenon not attested in standard adult Italian. We provide an analysis for participle agreement in adult Italian, based on Spec-Head agreement. We then argue that the child analyzes participle phrases with direct objects as APs, rather than as transitive VPs, resulting in an extension of Spec-Head agreement to the relations between the participle and its object. This error on the part of the child, we argue, derives from the existence in the childs grammar of the maturationally-determined Unique External Argument Proto Principle (UEAPP), requiring every predicative element to have its own unique subject. Independent evidence for UEAPP is provided by the confirmed prediction that children in the object agreement stage do not use unergative verbs in the passato prossimo. Additional evidence from early Polish further confirms our analysis, and we further show that the null subject stage in child language follows from UEAPP. We conclude by outlining the maturational schedule we propose.

Deconstructing the Construct

In the recent decade, Construct State nominals (henceforth CSN) in Hebrew and Arabic have been the focus of much discussion and research, resulting in many important insights. Originating with a proposal of Ritter (1987, 1988) many analyses of that construction seek to tie (at least some of) its properties to raising of N to D (cf. Ritter, (1987, 1988, 1991); Fassi Fehri (1988, 1989, 1994); Ouhalla (1990, 1991); Hazout (1990); Muhammad (1988); Duffield (1992); Siloni (in press, 1994); among others). The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I will review and evaluate the major insights behind the N-to-D hypothesis, showing that while some of them have led to an increased understanding of CSN, the N-to-D hypothesis does not, in fact, achieve the major tasks which its proponents claim it to achieve. I will conclude that while the operation of N-to-D cannot be directly excluded, based on word order, there is no direct evidence for its existence and the word order phenomena which such an account seeks to explain must be accounted for in some other way.

The ups and downs of Hebrew verb movement

This paper puts forth a hypothesis on the nature of the transition from VSO word order to SVO word order and, more specifically, on the status of grammars which are in a state of transition. I argue that among such grammars one expects to find one in which [SPEC,IP] is never a so-called A-position and in which syntactic verb movement to I is optional and that Modern Hebrew is an example of such a language. The first part of the paper is dedicated to evidence in favor of the optional nature of verb movement, while the second part explores the properties of [SPEC,IP] and the consequences which its non-A-status has for quantification, movement and word order.

Access to Universal Grammar: The real issues

Issues concerning UG access for L2 acquisition as formulated by Epstein et al. are misleading as well as poorly discussed. UG accessibility can only be fully evaluated with respect to the steady state gram mar reached by the learner. The steady state for LI learners is self evidently the adult grammar in the speech community. For L2 learners, however, the steady state is not obvious. Yet, without its clear characterization, debates concerning stages of L2 acquisition and direct and indirect UG accessibility cannot be resolved.

The Generative Word

Consider what speakers of English know about the word head. Beyond its pronunciation, or phonological form (PF) /h d/, they know its various meanings. They also know how to combine it with other words, that is, they know how this word relates to its larger syntactic context. One way to encode this knowledge is with categorial labels: the PF /h d/ in a noun (N) syntactic structure means BRAIN-CONTAINING BODY PART. Of course, this is not the only possible meaning of /h d/-N. Additional established meanings, possibly of a metaphoric origin, would be TOP, BRAIN, LEADER, etc.