The syntactic structure of predicatives : clues from the omission of the copula in child english

This paper explores the syntax of main clause predicatives from the perspective of trying to account for an asymmetry in copular constructions in certain languages. One of the languages in which we find such an asymmetry is child English (around age 2). Specifically, new results show that children acquiring English tend to use an overt (and inflected) copula in individual-level predicatives, but they tend to omit the copula in stage-level predicatives. The analysis adopted to account for this pattern draws on evidence from adult English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese that stage-level predicates are Aspectual (they contain AspP) while individual-level predicates are not (they involve only a lexical Small Clause predicate). Children's omission of the copula in structures with AspP is linked to the fact that at this stage of development, children fail to require finiteness in main clauses. In particular, Asp0 is temporally anchored in child English, thereby obviating the need for a finite (temporally anchored) Infl, i.e. an inflected copula

Verbs on the Fringe: Raising Verbs as Lexical Hazards

This paper explores the learning of raising verbs (e.g. seem), verbs which present particular problems for the language learner. In addition to having highly abstract lexical meanings, these verbs fail to provide some of the cues that guide learners to the meanings of other verbs. The central problem explored here is that discovering the syntactic structure of a raising expression (in particular, discovering that the main clause subject is not an argument of the raising verb) is not straightforward. Raising sentences like John seems to be happy are string-identical to control sentences, such as John wants to be happy, but the two have very different structures. The focus of this paper is the question of how a learner could determine the syntactic structure of raising expressions, and thus determine the syntactic and semantic properties of raising verbs. The results of a series of experiments with English-speaking adults are presented, as well as preliminary evidence from two on-going experiments with children. The experiments suggest that good cues to raising verbs or a raising structure come from expletive subjects (it, there) and from the pairing of an inanimate subject with a stative lower predicate (the rock to remain . . . )

The Development of the Copula in Child English: The Lightness of \u3cem\u3eBe\u3c/em\u3e

The goal of this dissertation is to account for the fact that young children acquiring English (around age 2 years) often produce utterances like (1), in which they omit a form of the copula, be. (1) I in the kitchen. (cf. I am in the kitchen) Children’s production of forms like (1) is interesting for two main reasons: firstly, utterances like these do not occur in the input (adult English); secondly, children’s omission of the copula adheres to a systematic pattern (their omission is neither across the board, nor haphazard). In particular, children do not omit the copula in utterances like (2). (2) He’s a dog. (@He a dog) The difference between the constructions in (1) and (2) can be characterized in terms of a difference in the sorts of properties denoted by the respective predicates: a location such as in the kitchen is a temporary property of the subject; a predicate such as a dog denotes a permanent property of the subject. I argue that these predicates differ from each other both semantically and syntactically: temporary (stage-level) predicates contain additional functional structure (an AspP) that permanent (individual-level) predicates lack. Crosslinguistic support for this proposal is provided. As for why children acquiring English ever produce forms like that in (1), I link this to the fact that non-finite main clauses are permitted in child English. I define finiteness in terms of a binding relation between an abstract Temporal Operator (TOP) and a functional head in the structure. A main clause is finite only if Infl is bound by TOP in CP. Certain grammars (among them child English) have the option that TOP may bind Asp, if Asp is projected in the particular clause. However, this binding relation does not result in the clause being finite. Since Asp is projected in clauses with stage-level predicates, but not in clauses with individual-level predicates, it follows that stage-level predicates may occur in non-finite clauses while individual-level predicates occur with a finite clause. Coupled with the hypothesis that an overt copula is finite (it is inflected over 99% of the time) and an omitted copula indicates non-finiteness (independent support is provided), the pattern of copula omission and production in child English is accounted for

Why Children Omit Function Morphemes: Metric vs. Syntactic Structure

this paper was to explore the possibility that children's pattern of function morpheme omissions might be explained entirely by either a metrical or a syntactic story. There is strong support for both approaches, i.e. children preserve function morphemes that occur in trochaic feet, and they preserve determiners and pronouns in the subject and object when their verb is finite. Nevertheless, we have seen that there are cases like (5), which are explainable by a metrical story but not by a syntactic one, and the finiteness patterns in Tables 2 and 3, and 6-10, which are explainable by a syntactic story, but not by a metrical one. Thus, as the metrical and syntactic theories stand, neither one can fully cover the range of omission patterns we find in children's speech. In the future, we might find a way of refining and/or expanding one of the two approaches such that it captures the full range of phenomena, or we might discover a new approach that takes both metrical and syntactic phenomena into account. Notes:

Learning Verbs that Lack Argument Structure : The case of raising verbs

"In this paper, I address the question of how language learners come to distinguish the class of ‘raising’ predicates from other kinds of predicates. The class of raising predicates is a small class, containing verbs such as seem, appear, tend and a few others. What distinguishes these predicates from other main verbs is that while they share the morphosyntactic properties of main verbs (for example, they take regular verbal inflection, they follow negation, they do not invert in questions), raising verbs are auxiliary-like in their argument structure. In particular, they do not select a subject argument, or any other thematic arguments. The first question I pose is how a learner could figure out the syntactic properties of raising predicates so as to define them as a class. The second question I pose is: once we identify a good learning strategy, is there evidence that children make use of this strategy, and if so, at what age? To clarify, I am not concerned in this paper with how children acquire the syntactic operation of raising, or A-movement. Rather, what I am interested in is how learners come to identify this particular class of predicates, given their shared property of not selecting any NP arguments

Acquiring a Grammar with Covert Head Incorporation: The Case of Have as a Complex Verb

This thesis investigates the problem of induction through an examination of a particular set of constructions (those containing the verb have) and a particular syntactic analysis that unifies this set (an analysis according to which have is a complex verb). Two main questions are addressed. One asks what type of grammatical input is necessary to acquire a grammar containing a complex verb. The other asks whether this input is available to children, and what type of information children actually rely on in order to acquire this complex verb. I summarize the syntactic evidence for analyzing have as a complex verb (as the copula be plus an incorporated abstract preposition), which is based on arguments seeking to unify crosslinguistic patterns found in possessive and past participle constructions. Based on these arguments, I use a computational learning algorithm to demonstrate that fairly rich syntactic input is needed to identify a grammar containing complex have. My results show that i..