The dissertation summarized here provides an account of the fact that young children acquiring English (around age 2) often produce utterances like (1), in which they omit a form of the copula,be.(1)I in the kitchen.Children’s production of forms like (1) is interesting for two main reasons: firstly, utterances like these do not occur in the input (adult English); secondly, children’s omission of the copula conforms to a systematic pattern (it is neither across the board, nor haphazard). In particular, children omit the copula far less frequently in utterances like (2).(2)He’s a dog.The difference between the constructions in (1) and (2) can be characterized in terms of the well-known semantic stage-level/individual-level contrast. That is, a location such as ‘in the kitchen’ denotes a stage-level property of the subject; a predicate such as ‘a dog’ denotes an individual-level property of the subject. I argue for a syntactic difference between stage- and individual-level predicates: stage-level predicates contain additional functional structure (AspP) that individual-level predicates lack. Cross-linguistic support for this proposal is provided.As for why children acquiring English omit the copula in main clauses, I link this to the fact that non-finite main clauses are permitted in child English. I define finiteness in terms of a binding relation between an abstract Tense Operator (TOP) (located in CP) and Infl. In certain grammars (among them child English) TOPmay bind Asp instead of Infl, if Asp is projected in the particular clause. However, this binding relation does not result in the clause being finite. Since Asp is projected in clauses with stage-level predicates, but not in those with individual-level predicates, it follows that stage-level predicates may occur in non-finite clauses while individual-level predicates occur with a finite clause. Coupled with the hypothesis that an overt copula is finite (in the sample studied here it is inflected over 99% of the time) and an omitted copula indicates non-finiteness, the pattern of copula omission and production in child English is accounted for.

One of the fundamental puzzles language learners must solve is the mapping of a string of words onto a particular (correct) syntactic structure. In this article, I examine the problem of how learners should resolve the ambiguity presented by a string that could have either a raising or a control structure. I provide both logical and empirical arguments against the view that children should be biased to assume that such a string has a control structure. Instead, I propose two families of cues, based on a psycholinguistic experiment with adults, which can be used in a probabilistic manner to parse an ambiguous string and to categorize raising and control verbs.

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Understanding emotion words is vital to understanding, regulating, and communicating one's emotions. Yet, little work examines how emotion words are acquired by children. Previous research in linguistics suggests that children use the sentence frame in which a novel word is presented to home in on the meaning of that word, in conjunction with situational cues from the environment. No research has examined how children integrate these cues to learn the meaning of emotion adjectives (e.g., "happy," "sad," "mad"). We conducted 2 studies examining the role of sentence frame and situational context in children's (ages 3-5) understanding of the meanings of novel words denoting emotions. In Study 1 (N ϭ 135) children viewed a conversation wherein a novel "alien" word was presented in 1 of 3 sentence frames that varied in how likely the word was to denote an emotion (i.e., is daxy, feels daxy, or feels daxy about). Children selected the image that represented the meaning of the word in a picture-pointing task. Images depicted aliens experiencing an emotion, a physical state, or performing an action. In Study 2 (N ϭ 113) situational context was added via cartoons depicting an emotional scenario. Findings suggest that children are more likely to associate emotion images with a novel word with increasing age, more informative sentence frames, and when the situational context implies that an emotion is present. This provides important insight on how educational and clinical settings can use language and situational context to aide in emotion understanding.