Covert movement in English probing wh-questions

Besides fronted information-seeking questions, English also allows for two types of wh-in-situ ones: echo questions, which are used to request a repetition or a clarification of a previous utterance, and probing questions, which are often used in quiz shows, classroom settings, and child-directed speech to "prompt" the addressee for an answer. An acceptability judgment task shows that PQs with multiple wh-phrases get a significantly lower acceptability score than echo questions with multiple wh-phrases despite their similarity in surface structure, which suggests a syntactic difference below the surface. Independent syntactic evidence confirms the result and further suggests that while echo questions involve no syntactic movement (Dayal, 1996), probing questions involve covert wh-movement

Unifying Syntactic and Semantic Approaches to Unaccusativity: A Connectionist Approach

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 156-16

An Optimality-Theoretic Typology of Case and Grammatical Voice Systems

Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Semantic Typology and Semantic Universals (1993

Developing knowledge of nonadjacent dependencies

Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language. One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies—relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase, or sentence. These dependencies often involve multiple levels of representation and abstraction, built up as infants gain experience with their native language. The authors used the Headturn Preference Procedure to systematically investigate the early acquisition of 1 such dependency, the agreement between a subject and verb in French, at 6 different ages between 14 and 24 months. The results reveal a complex developmental trajectory that provides the first evidence that infants might indeed progress through distinct stages in the acquisition of this nonadjacent dependency. The authors discuss how changes in general cognition and representational knowledge (from reflecting surface statistics to higher-level morphological features) might account for their findings. These findings highlight the importance of studying language acquisition at close time intervals over a substantial age range

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Spanish

​Studies across many languages (e.g., Dutch, English, Farsi, Spanish, Xhosa) have failed to show early acquisition of subject-verb agreement, while recent studies on French reveal acquisition by 30 months of age. Using a similar procedure as in previous French studies, the present study evaluated whether earlier comprehension of subject-verb agreement in (Mexican) Spanish can be revealed when task demands are lowered. Two experiments using a touch-screen pointing task tested comprehension of SV agreement by monolingual Spanish-speaking children growing up in Mexico City, between about 3 and 5 years of age. In Experiment 1, the auditory stimuli consisted of a transitive verb+pseudonoun object (e.g. agarra el micho ‘he throws the micho’ vs. agarran el duco ‘they throw the duco’); results failed to show early comprehension of SV agreement, replicating previous findings. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli were used, with the crucial difference that the word objeto ‘object’ replaced all pseudonouns; results revealed SV agreement comprehension as early as 41 to 50 months. Taken together, our findings show that comprehension at this age is facilitated when task demands are lowered, here by not requiring children to process pseudowords (even when these were not critical to the task). These findings hence underscore the importance of task-/stimulus-specific features when testing early morphosyntactic development, and suggest that previous results may have underestimated Spanish-speaking children’s competence

Prefixal agreement and impersonal ‘il’ in Spoken French: Experimental evidence

Spoken Continental French exhibits a number of properties which were classically argued to characterize null subject languages (Rizzi, 1986b; Jaeggli and Safir, 1989). While it has been shown (e.g. see Gilligan, 1987; Newmeyer, 2005: 45) that this so-called cluster of properties does not characterize all such languages, Spoken French for example appears to allow non-referentia