3-106 - Generative Grammar: Flexible Approaches to Early Development of Syntax

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The Minimalist Program, reducing the fundamental complexity of grammatical processes in generative syntax, offers renewed opportunity for studies of early development of syntax. We propose that children’s syntactic development is best conceptualized as the gradual mastery of principles and specifics of a generative syntax, employing as basic syntactic combinatory operation the asymmetrical head-dependent relation of Merge (or Dependency).
Three papers present findings from differing approaches. The first paper demonstrates three children’s varying use of merge and recursion in their earliest combinations and shows that direct assessment of grammatical complexity expands on information derived from MLU.
The second hypothesized that children’s sentences longer than two words built with the iterated Merge / Dependency relation require new learning from the parental input, and cannot not be built on their own shorter sentences by combining them or changing them minimally. The distribution of syntactic “root” words of children’s early three-word sentences were much better predicted by the relative token frequency of parental three-word sentences than by children’s two-word sentences.
The third paper suggests new methodological and empirical approaches to child language. It proposes a statistical test for syntactic productivity and provides a comparative analysis of African American English and Mainstream American English acquisition that bears on current debates on early syntax.

In conclusion, generative grammar offers a useful approach to the analysis of early child language, allowing for assessment of growth continuous with the adult system and capable of elucidating individual differences in development.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Lorraine McCune, Rutgers Univ

Discussant

• Lorraine McCune, Rutgers Univ

Individual Presentations

• Merge and Recursion as Generative Developmental Processes: Analysis from 3 Children’s Early Combinations. - Presenting Author: Isabelle Roy, Université Paris 8; Bridget Copley, CNRS/Université Paris 8 UMR 7023 "Structures Formelles du Langage”; Lorraine McCune, Rutgers Univ

• How to Construct Three-word-long Sentences the Generative way - Presenting Author: Anat Ninio, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• How Abstract is Children’s Syntax - Presenting Author: Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania