CNL Afternoon Tea

Carson Schutze (UCLA)

Early Inflection: New Evidence for the ATOM

Monday March 18th, 4:00pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

In 1995, Schütze and Wexler proposed an account of the Root/Optional Infinitive phenomenon that was geared particularly to accounting for the distribution of non-nominative subjects in child English (him run, my tired, her singing). The idea was that Agreement features and Tense features are independently omissible from INFL at this stage, hence Agr/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The original data motivating this proposal came chiefly from three children on CHILDES; in the intervening years the empirical generality of the patterns predicted by ATOM has been challenged. In this talk I present two new sets of evidence that reaffirm the model. First, English
data from a much larger sample of children recorded under better controlled
conditions. Second and more strikingly, data from the acquisition of Swahili, whose tense and agreement morphology is purely concatenative, transparently showing independent omission of these two morphemes even when the result is not a possible word of the adult language.