Fragments Along the Way: Minimalism as an Account of Some Stages in First Language Acquisition

摘要

We take up three instances in which the minimalist model of syntax offers an account of children’s linguistic behaviour: 1) Merge can explain the two-word utterance stage in child language production and the subsequent stage involving utterances of variable length. 2) Errors in production of complex questions include the production of a middle copy of a question word (along the lines of ‘What did you see what Jane ate?’). This can be accounted for in terms of the child’s overt marking of a phase. 3) Differential rates with definite pronouns according to the structure in which the pronoun is contained. These phenomena all involve the combination of limited capacity production/comprehension systems with the syntactic component.