On the acquisition of statives in child russian

It has been previously reported that in languages demonstrating the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage the use of RIs is characterized by two properties: these forms are overwhelmingly eventive and have, in the majority of instances, a modal interpretation. Hoekstra and Hyams (1998, 1999) have proposed a theory stating that these two properties of RIs are co-dependent in that the application of the modal reference restriction limits the use of the aspectual verbal classes to eventive predicates. Furthermore, this theory assumed that the described mutual dependency of these constraints was valid cross-linguistically. In this paper, we investigate the application of this theory to the case of RIs in Russian, one of the languages exhibiting the RI Stage. Using new longitudinal data from two monolingual Russian-speaking children, we demonstrate that the predictions of Hoekstra and Hyams’ approach are not realized for Russian child speech. While the constraint requiring that Ris have a modal reference does not seem to apply in Russian since the infinitival forms do receive past and present tense interpretation, these predicates are still overwhelmingly eventive and stative predicates appear mostly as finite verbs. Having shown that a theory connecting the application of the two restrictions on RIs does not account for the Russian data, we examine several alternative analyses of Russian RIs. We arrive at a conclusion that an explanation based on the lack of the event variable in stative predicates (Kratzer 1989) necessary for the interpretation of RIs in discourse (Avrutin 1997) succeeds in handling the Russian data presented in this article

Acquisition of Pronominal Clitics in Romanian

This paper uses new evidence from elicited production experiments to establish that Romanian children do not omit either direct or indirect object clitics at a significant rate. The results reported for the acquisition of indirect object clitics are particularly significant in that, for the first time, it is possible to demonstrate the similarity between the acquisition of direct and indirect object clitics in Romanian and, arguably, for other languages that pattern with Romanian in the relevant respects. Furthermore, our findings receive a natural explanation if it is assumed that two conditions must be met for children to produce clitics. First, children's grammars must not be constrained by any relevant grammatical constraints, such as the Unique Checking Constraint (Wexler 1998, 2003). Second, children must be able to produce utterances of the length required by the clitic constructions

Structural connection in syntax and processing : studies in Russian and Japanese

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 287-293).by Maria A. Babyonyshev.Ph.D

The EPP, Unaccusativity, and the Resultative Constructions in Japanese

In this work in progress we explore the possibility that the EPP, which has been claimed to be "strong" universally for T, may not need to emerge when the verb is unaccusative. We present a detailed analysis of the -te aru resultative constructions in Japanese. There are two -te aru constructions, "intransitivizing" and "non-intransitivizing." It is the "intransitivinzing" construction which we claim lacks the EPP on T. The nominative object of this construction must move out of its VP/ vP, but it does not go all the way to the matrix Spec of TP. The matrix T apparently does not project a specifier, which is consistent with the idea that it does not have the EPP feature. The other resultative construction, "non-intransitivizing," is a subject-to-subject raising construction and the T does have the EPP. While we do not attempt in this paper to try to explain the root of this difference between the two resultative constructions, it is possible that the difference is pointing to some fundamental property of the EPP which has yet to be discovered

Acquisition of Pronominal Clitics in Romanian

This paper uses new evidence from elicited production experiments to establish that Romanian children do not omit either direct or indirect object clitics at a significant rate. The results reported for the acquisition of indirect object clitics are particularly significant in that, for the first time, it is possible to demonstrate the similarity between the acquisition of direct and indirect object clitics in Romanian and, arguably, for other languages that pattern with Romanian in the relevant respects. Furthermore, our findings receive a natural explanation if it is assumed that two conditions must be met for children to produce clitics. First, children's grammars must not be constrained by any relevant grammatical constraints, such as the Unique Checking Constraint (Wexler 1998, 2003). Second, children must be able to produce utterances of the length required by the clitic constructions

Investigating the effects of syllable complexity in Russian-speaking children with SLI.

This study examined the effect of number of syllables and syllable structure on repetition of pseudo-words by Russian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children. One hundred and forty-four pseudo-words, varying in length and syllable complexity, were presented to two groups of children: 15 children with SLI, age range 4 ; 0 to 8 ; 8, and 15 TD children matched in age to the SLI group. The number of errors in the repetition of pseudo-words was analyzed in terms of the number of syllables and syllable complexity. The results demonstrated that children with SLI have deficits in working memory capacity. In addition to the pseudo-word length, the repetition performance was affected by syllable structure complexity