CNL Lunch Talks

Graciela Tesan

Parametric Variation in Child English

Thursday November 13th 2003, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Two-year-old English-speaking children allow omission of the inflection morphemes associated with tense and agreement, as claimed by the Optional Infinitive Hypothesis (e.g., Hoekstra and Hyams 1998, Rizzi 1993; Wexler 1994; 1998). However, optionality is unexpected in the light of current approaches to human language; constructions are derived by “the interaction of the principles of UG, with the values of parameters fixed” (Chomsky, 1995). To understand the development of inflection in English-speaking children in these terms, we studied utterances with the presence of inflection. We report the results from an elicited production study with three 2-year-old children, targeting 3rd person singular contexts. Within the two-month period of greatest fluctuation, the three children produced uninflected forms (1a) 37% of the time and inflected forms (1b,c,d) 63%. Two of the three children produced non-adult inflected variants (1c) 31% of the time and (1d) 4%.

  (1a) He want to drink (CW2;01)

  (1b) Pooh go-(e)s down there (CM2;09)

  (1c) The spider-s go fit here (SL2;01)

  (1d) He-s fit-s in there though (CW2;01)

We propose that this variation results from selecting morpho-syntactic properties consistent with other adult languages (Crain, 1991). According to Lasnik (1995) languages have either a featural or an affixal system. English has a ‘hybrid’ system; modals and auxiliaries realize a featural I and 3rd sg [-s] realize an affixal I. We argue that some children may initially set the parameter to featural I, even for lexical verbs, hence the non-adult options in (1c,d).