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UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, no.5

Language Development and Breakdown 1

edited by Jill Gilkerson, Misha Becker, and Nina Hyams

Table of Contents

Lisa Matthewson and Jeannette Schaeffer
Grammar and pragmatics in the aquisition of article systems
1–39
Ivano Caponigro
Is essere not to be?
40–55
Misha Becker
Children's acquisition of function morphemes: Syntactic and prosodic influences
56–90
Susan Curtiss, Stella de Bode, and Donald Shields
Language after hemispherectomy
91–112
Harold Torrence
A note on the inflection of stative and eventive verbs in child English
113–121
Nina Hyams
Finiteness, aspect and mood in early grammar: A cross-linguistic perspective
122–152

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Abstracts

Lisa Matthewson and Jeannette Schaeffer – Grammar and pragmatics in the aquisition of article systems

In this study we bring together data from English child language and St'at'imcets, a northern interior Salish language spoken in the southwest interior of British Columbia, Canada. The data concern the use of articles, which is strikingly similar in both languages. We argue that, while English adult language chooses its articles according to whether there is access to the so-called 'Common Ground' between speaker and hearer (Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, 1990), St'at'imcets and English child language base their choice of determiners on Speaker Beliefs.

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Ivano Caponigro – Is essere not to be?

According to Becker (1998a,b; 1999), children acquiring English virtually never omit have, while their production rate of be is not uniform across constructions. It is high in existential/deictic and demonstrative constructions, low in locatives and varies in progressives and predicatives across the children. I studied the production of essere 'be' and avere 'have' in 4 young Italian-speaking children, and I found that they either omit neither of the two verbs or their omission rate is quite low and does not vary across constructions. I suggest that these differences can be accounted for by refining Beckeršs (1998a,b) hypothesis that the presence of additional functional material in Infl drives overtness even in the early stages of language production. Becker does not seem to consider subject agreement features (person and number) as functional material that can drive overtness. I suggest, instead, that at least subject person agreement features need to be overtly realized (Overt Subject Person Agreement Requirement, OSPAR). English and Italian satisfy this requirement in two different ways. English, a non-pro drop language, satisfies OSPAR by means of subjects; Italian, a pro-drop language, by means of a rich verbal morphology. Thus, children acquiring English can drop be without violating OSPAR, while children acquiring Italian cannot drop essere unless the subject is overtly realized.

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Misha Becker – Children's acquisition of function morphemes: Syntactic and prosodic influences

Previous research on the omission of function morphemes in children's speech has focused on either prosodic/metrical or syntactic factors but has not directly compared the two domains. In this paper I show that while both prosodic and syntactic theories make certain correct predictions about the omission pattern of function morphemes, the influence of each grammatical domain is highly contingent on the type of speech task involved. New experimental data combined with an examination of naturalistic speech reveals that prosody plays a greater role in constraining imitative output forms than spontaneous speech, while syntax (specifically the requirement of spec-head agreement between the subject and Inflection) influences spontaneously generated speech more strongly than imitative speech. Furthermore, I show that children's pattern of function morpheme omissions in imitative speech is best accounted for by a general dispreference in the grammar for upbeat syllables (weak syllables that directly precede a strong syllable), rather than a trochaic foot-based account.

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Susan Curtiss, Stella de Bode, and Donald Shields – Language after hemispherectomy

We report on the effects of etiology, side of damage, age at surgery, age at seizure onset and seizure duration on language development in a large pediatric hemispherectomy population. Surprisingly, side of damage did not predict outcome nor did early age at surgery. Moreover, the most striking findings regarding linguistic outcomes were demonstrated in the right hemispherectomies; specifically, many failed to develop language at all, and for those who did, age at seizure onset/surgery was strongly predictive of outcome. Additionally, developmental pathology was more strongly associated with poor language than was acquired pathology. Implications of these and other findings are discussed.

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Harold Torrence – A note on the inflection of stative and eventive verbs in child English

This study looks at the distribution of inflection types and how they related to the eventivity of a verb. Root infinitives, present tense ­s, present progressives, and present participles were the subjects of investigation. It is found that there is a correlation between the aspect and eventivity of a verb and the type of morphology that it will appear with. A proposal is made that the data can be accounted for if root infinitives and present tense ­s forms are both taken to be specified for perfective aspect and present progressives and bare present participles are specified for imperfective aspect.

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Nina Hyams – Finiteness, aspect and mood in early grammar: A cross-linguistic perspective

Various studies of early language have revealed that children use non-finite verbs in root clauses. The best-known case of this is the root infinitive phenomenon observed in Dutch, French and other languages (eg. Papa schoenen wassen. 'Daddy shoes wash-inf.', Michel pas dormir. 'Michel not sleep-inf.'). Other root non-finite phenomena include bare verbs (eg English: Eve sit floor), bare past and present participles (eg. Italian: Presa Checco campana 'taken Francesco bell', English: man making muffins), among others. There has been a great deal of research on the morphosyntax of these constructions, but far less has been said about their interpretation. In this paper I will focus on the interpretive properties of root infinitives and the other non-finite forms, in particular their aspectual and modal properties. We will see that these non-finite clauses differ from each other and from the respective finite clauses in their interpretation. This calls into question accounts which treat non-finite forms in early grammar as free variants (either phonological or morphosyntactic) of the finite forms. The non-finite structures (which lack tense by definition) offer a unique window into the aspectual and modal properties of early language that might otherwise be obscured by the tense specification in finite sentences.

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