CNL Lunch

Graciela Tesan & Rosalind Thornton

Bits and Pieces of Inflection: A Case Study of an Optional Infinitive Child

Thursday May 3rd, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

In this paper, we present a case study of one early talking 2-year-old in the O(ptional) I(nfinitive) stage. The longitudinal data ranges from 2;0;12 to 2;06;21. Children in the OI stage (Wexler, 1990, 1992, etc, Harris and Wexler, 1993) are characterized as fluctuating between forms like 'he goes' and 'he go'. However, spontaneous speech data yield too few of the 3rd person singular and negative forms that are critical to understanding how inflection develops in English-speaking children. Using elicited production, we obtained a robust sample of sentences with 3SG subjects in affirmative and negative contexts. In addition, we elicited VP ellipsis, because ellipsis cannot be licensed without overt inflection.

The subject of our study shows a more complex set of data compared to what has previously been observed. She produced 3SG forms with a high percentage of INFL for both affirmative (78%) and negative (83%) sentences. However, unusual non-adult patterns appeared with INFL realized in non-canonical positions (he's not fit there). Moreover, VP ellipsis could be licensed by non-adult inflection (e.g. Adult: Does he fit? Child: He's not) prior to the appearance of do-support in the grammar. VP ellipsis did not emerge until inflection was used in some variant 90% of the time.

Assuming that children do not violate UG as a starting point, we would like to take these data to indicate that this childâs difficulty with INFL lies not in the syntactic component, but it reflects a developing morphological component (Bobalijk, 2000).