Thomas Roeper

The Acquisition of Long-Distance Rules

How does a child acquire a rule for a potentially infinite domain? For instance, in (1) the “what” is connected to a position three verbs away: (1) what did John say that Mary wanted Jim to see

The Emergence of Bound Variable Structures

Even for adults, quantifiers such as “all”, “some”, “every” seem to involve a difficult mapping between logic and grammar. A sentence like “every boy ate every food” requires a little concentration before the meaning comes through. One might think that there is no natural mapping of such sophisticated aspects of cognition onto grammatical structure. Current linguistic theory, however, reveals that syntax puts sharp limits on how quantification works. The study of quantifiers might reveal how cognition connects to grammar and how they are intertwined in the process of acquisition. We will try to present the acquisition problem in a manner slightly abstracted from the technical details of linguistic theory.

Multiple Grammars and Second Language Representation

This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal is based on the idea that any human grammar readily accommodates sets of rules in sub-grammars that can seem (apparently) contradictory. We discuss the rationale behind this proposal and establish a dialogue with recent research in SLA, multilingualism, L3 acquisition, and L2 processing. We compare the Multiple Grammars explanation to optionality in L2 to other current proposals, and provide experimental results that can demonstrate the existence of active sub-grammars in the linguistic representation of L2 speakers.

Null Subjects in Early Child English and the Theory of Economy of Projection

It is well known that young children may omit referential subjects regardless of whether they are acquiring a pro-drop language such as Italian or a non-pro-drop language such as English. The classic proposal of Hyams (1986) according to which these early null subjects instantiate pro in both types of languages has recently come under attack from various sides. Bloom (1990, 1993) and Valian (1991) argue that missing subjects in early child English are a non-syntactic performance phenomenon that is due to a production bottleneck which severely limits the length of young children’s utterances, a view which they support with an inverse correlation between subject-length (i.e., full NP, pronoun, null) and VP-length. Rizzi (1994a, b) and Hyams (1994) maintain that empty subjects in early child English are a syntactic phenomenon but relate them to adult English Diary Drop and German-style Topic Drop instead of Italian-style pro-drop. In particular, they argue that like adult Diary/Topic Drop and unlike adult pro-drop, these missing subjects in early child language are restricted to the first position of non-wh root clauses.

Expressives and Identity Conditions

EXPRESSIVES AND IDENTITY CONDITIONS Christopher Potts Ash Asudeh Seth Cable Yurie Hara Eric McCready Luis Alonso-Ovalle Rajesh Bhatt Christopher Davis Angelika Kratzer Tom Roeper Martin Walkow Müller, Gereon. 2004. Verb-second as vP-first. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 7:179–234. Nilsen, Øystein. 2003. Eliminating positions. Doctoral dissertation, OTS, Utrecht. Pafel, Jürgen. 1998. Skopus und logische Struktur. Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereichs 340, Bericht 129. Tübingen/Stuttgart: University of Tübingen/University of Stuttgart. Reinhart, Tanya. 1983. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sauerland, Uli, and Paul Elbourne. 2002. Total reconstruction, PF movement, and derivational order. Linguistic Inquiry 33: 283–319. Thiersch, Craig. 1985. Some notes on scrambling in the German Mittelfeld, VP and X-bar theory. Ms., University of Connecticut, Storrs, and University of Cologne.

Relative clauses are barriers to wh -movement for young children

Two studies are described which investigate preschool childrens sensitivity to relative clauses as barriers to the movement of wh-questions. The children were presented with short stories followed by questions in which the wh-word had two possible sites of interpretation, the ungrammatical option being inside a relative clause. A cross-sectional study with 23 children aged 3;1 to 6;1, and a longitudinal study over the course of one year with 12 children aged 3;1 to 4;1 at the start, found young children refused to extract wh-questions from the ungrammatical site inside a relative clause. This confirms other findings that childrens early grammars are sensitive to universal constraints on movement. In addition, the children differentiated between wh-complements and relative clauses in their tendency to mistakenly answer the medial wh-complementizer but not the wh-relative pronoun. Explanations for the latter are framed in terms of childrens initial assumptions about the attachment of complements.

Scope and the structure of bare nominals : evidence from child language

Abstract The special semantic characteristics of bare nominals (nonspecificity and lack of scopal interactions) are best explained in terms of an approach that views these not as full DPs, but as minimal nominal projections containing an internal pro argument. The evidence from child language suggests that such aspects of the interpretation of bare nominals are readily accessible in childrens grammar. Thirty-six English-speaking children participated in a controlled comprehension study comparing their interpretation of sentences with quantifiers involving both the bare noun construction and full DPs. Children seemed to readily understand the interpretive differences between the two structures, suggesting that the presence or absence of a determiner is a sufficient trigger for the acquisition of such construction.

Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition

Introduction .- Missing Subjects in Early Child Language, Nina Hyams .- Grammatical Computation in the Optional Infinitive Stage, Ken Wexler .- Computational Models of Language Acquisition, Charles Yang .- The Acquisition of the Passive, Kamil Ud Deen .- The Acquistion Path of Wh-Questions, Tom Roeper and Jill de Villiers .- Binding and Coreference: Views from Child Language, Cornelia Hamann .- Universal Grammar and the Acquisition of Japanese Syntax, Koji Sugisaki and Yukio Otsu .- Studying Language Acquistion Through the Prism of Isomorphism, Julien Musolino .- Acquiring Knowledge of Universal Quantification, William Philip .- Name Index .- Subject Index

Evidentials in Tibetan: Acquisition, Semantics, and Cognitive Development.

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required for the use of evidentials in questions. We then examine connections between the mastery of indirect evidentials and childrens inferential competence.

Barriers, Binding, and Acquisition of the DP-NP Distinction

Evidence is presented from an experimental study with 21 children ages 4 to 5 years suggesting the coincident emergence of certain DPs as barriers to wh-movement and as separate binding domains. It is argued that the default assumption for childrens grammar may be to assume NP is the maximal projection for a structure until a DP proves justified. When a DP emerges, it simultaneously becomes a barrier to movement and a separate domain for binding. This account makes contact with several aspects of current grammatical theory of the NP-DP distinction, and its implications for acquisition are explored.