2012年重庆市高等学校教学团队推荐表 48.ppt

GRS LX 700Language Acquisition andLinguistic Theory Week 4. Null subjects(and some more root infinitives) Null subjects (in English) Until after around 2 years old, kids will often omit subjects: Drop bean. Fix Mommy shoe. Helping Mommy. Want go get it. Why? Null subjects Lots of languages allow you to drop the subject. Italian, Spanish: the verb generally carries enough inflection to identify the person, number of the subject. Chinese: where the subject is obvious from context it can be left out. Not in English though: Let’s talk about Bill. *Left. *Bought groceries. *Dropped eggs. On the view that kids know language, but are just trying to figure out the specific details (principles and parameters), one possibility is that they always start out speaking Italian (or Chinese) until they get evidence to the contrary. Null subjects are grammatical for kids Null subjects Kids do tend to speak in short sentences. There seem to in fact be identifiable stages in terms of the length of the kids’ sentences (one-word stage, two-word stage, multi-word stage…), often measured in terms of MLU (mean length of utterance) which roughly corresponds to linguistic development. Perhaps the kid’s just trying to say a three-word sentence in a two-word window, so something has to go. That is, some kind of processing limitation. Subject vs. object drop Null subjects Subjects (in a non-null subject language like English) are way more likely to be dropped than objects. There’s something special about subjects. Makes a processing account more difficult to justify. Bloom (1990) made some well-known proposals about how the null subject phenomenon could be seen as a processing issue, and tried to explain why subjects are the most susceptible to being dropped. See also Hyams Wexler (1993) for a reply. Null subjects vs. time Null subjects seem to be pretty robustly confined to a certain portion of linguistic development. There’s a pretty sharp dropoff at around 2.5 or 3. Hamann’s Danish k