Week 12.Acquirers and questions.ppt

GRS LX 700Language Acquisition andLinguistic Theory Week 12.Acquirers and questions English wh-questions What will John bake? Two components to forming a (main clause) wh-question (in English): Move a wh-word to SpecCP. Move T to C (Subject-Aux Inversion—SAI) Question formation Declarative: John will buy coffee. Wh-inversion: What will John buy? Wh-fronting: What will John buy? Yes/No-inversion: Will John buy coffee? Greenberg (1963): Wh-inversion implies Wh-fronting. Yes/No-inversion implies Wh-inversion. Wh-inversion?Wh-fronting English, German: Both. What will John buy? Japanese Korean: neither. John will buy what? Finnish: Wh-fronting only. What John will buy? Unattested: Wh-inversion only. *Will John buy what? Y/N-inversion?Wh-inversion English: Both Will John buy coffee? What will John buy? Japanese: Neither John will buy coffee? John will buy what? Lithuanian: Wh-inversion only. John will buy coffee? What will John buy? Unattested: Y/N-inversion only. Will John buy coffee? What John will buy? Universals and parameters Even if it’s not completely clear what accounts for the implicational universals, inversion and wh-fronting do seem to be independent. A kid needs to learn what his/her language does in each domain. Wh-inversion implies Wh-fronting: Perhaps the only reason you’d move T to C is to get a [wh] feature originally on T into a position where it can be checked by a wh-word in SpecCP (Wh-criterion, see Guasti). Y/N-inversion implies Wh-inversion: ? Kids get these parameters down early Guasti (2000): Adam, Eve, and Sarah pretty much never left wh-words in situ, and when they did it was generally in a (grammatical) echo question. Same with inversion, there seem to be very few (on the order of 1%) errors of non-inversion in German, Italian, Swedish. Yet Bellugi (1971)—very famously—seemed to find something different in English… Stages: SAI in yes-no questions, not in wh-questions Notice this runs counter to Greenberg’s univeral. SAI in positive que