Inversion and finiteness in Spanish and English: Developmental evidence from the optional infinitive and optional inversion stages

Abstract

There is evidence to suggest that finiteness marking on verbs and subject-auxiliary inversion are related phenomena in English. In contrast, in Spanish there is evidence consistent with finiteness marking on verbs and the apparently similar phenomenon of subject-verb inversion being unrelated. In both cases, most of the evidence adduced comes from adult acceptability judgments and other adult psycholinguistic work. In the present article, we present evidence from child English and Spanish that supports the interrelatedness of finiteness and inversion in English, but not Spanish. Specifically, we show that child English speakers who are in the optional infinitive stage have variable judgments of finiteness that are predictive of their independently measured inversion judgments. In contrast, no such relationship appears to hold between the variance in finiteness and the variance in inversion judgments of child Spanish speakers of the same preschool age. We take this to be novel confirmation of the hypothesis that subject-auxiliary inversion in English takes finite tense as a necessary condition. In Spanish, in contrast, it appears that it is not necessary for a finite verb to move to the left periphery for subject-verb inversion.*

Interface Delay

“…These observations are further elucidated in Grinstead, Vega-Mendoza and Goodall (2018) in the following ways. There had always been an adult syntactic literature that argued that V-to-I-to-C, or subject-auxiliary inversion, was typologically particular to Germanic languages, and not characteristic of Romance languages, making Rizzi's (1992) extension of construction to Romance a mistake.…”

“…Finally, searches in spontaneous production data for un-inverted wh-questions in child Spanish, though complicated by the fact that there are not many overt subjects to help judge the position of verbs, yield no examples (Grinstead, Reig, Hernández & Culicover, 2007). 1 These facts led to the conclusion not only that the child analysis was not correctly extended from English to Spanish, but to the conclusion that the adult V-to-I-to-C analysis of "subject-verb inversion" for Spanish was not correct, as argued in Grinstead et al (2018). In this way, child language data was made relevant to adult linguistic theory (or perhaps just "linguistic theory").…”

Lessons from overtly-headed exclamatives in Spanish varieties

“…( 12)). Formally, therefore, the presence of que is typically employed to distinguish a root wh-exclamative from a root wh-interrogative (Villalba 2016b(Villalba , 2019 Such examples are reminiscent of the well-documented cases of non-inverting interrogatives featuring complex wh-phrases and rhetorical questions with por qué 'why'/cómo 'how come' (see, e.g., RAE-ASALE 2009 andGrinstead et al 2018; see also fn. 6).…”