Functional Categories in Early Child German

Abstract

In this article, we study the representation of phrase structure in early child German through the investig,ation of extensive longitudinal data from 7 monolingual German-speaking children (ages 1;8 to 2;9) with respect to verb placement, verb inflection, negation, wh-pronouns, and complementizers. In our data, we find clear evidence that children's grammar at Stage I generates at least one functional projection-namely, IP, or rather F(inite)P. There is, however, no empirical support for a second functional projection (CP) in Stage I. We argue that children construct phrase-structure trees in a gradual fashion, on the basis of X-bar theory and the input they receive.

The gradual acquisition of clitic “se” in Spanish L2

“…Other types of verbs like transitive verbs implying inalienable possession, as in (7c), and non-anticausative intransitive verbs, as in (7e), require the activation or acquisition of the low applicative head. When this has been acquired or activated (they defended a revised version of the Weak Continuity Hypothesis of Functional Categories; see Clahsen, 1990;Clahsen et al 1993;Meisel and Müller, 1992), clitic "se" is produced with transitive verbs implying inalienable possession and non-anticausative intransitive verbs. These latter configurations with consumption verbs as in (7d) require an extra causative functional head and are later acquired presumably due to their intricate complexity (as argued by Romero and Teomiro, 2012).…”

Moving in small steps towards verb second: A case study

“…Examples with sentence-initial negation have previously been analyzed as lacking subject movement out of the V-domain in Radford (1990:152f. ), Platzack (1990Platzack ( , 1992 and Clahsen et al (1993Clahsen et al ( /1994 The remaining 14 utterances with Neg-Subj word order are non-subject-initial clauses where the placement of the subject is governed by a principle of information structure.…”

Controversies about CP: A Comparison of Language Acquisition and Language Impairments in Broca's Aphasia

“…The first word combinations in German child language are characterized by the following properties (Clahsen, Penke, & Parodi, 1994;: (i) there is no systematic agreement between subject and verb, (ii) only a restricted set of verbs such as modals, auxiliaries, and forms of the copula sein (''be'') are marked as finite and appear in first or second position, (iii) nonfinite verbs remain in clausefinal position, and (iv) there is no evidence for wh-elements and complementizers. To capture this developmental stage, we proposed a phrase structure tree with only one underspecified functional projection, viz.…”

“…Fig. 2) (Clahsen et al, 1994. The head of FP is specified for the feature [ϩFINITE] and functions as a landing site for finite verbs.…”

“…Instead, children's grammars generate phrase-structure representations that contain only a reduced set of functional categories, or no functional categories at all. These reduced structure representations are expanded during language acquisition, for instance by maturational processes (e.g., Radford, 1990;Atkinson, 1996), or by the learning of new lexical elements (e.g., Clahsen, Penke, & Parodi, 1994;Clahsen, Eisenbeiss, & Penke 1996;Radford, 1996).…”