Phrase Structure in Early Child English: A View from the Minimalist Program

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370550
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Mie University
• Principal Investigator: Sugisaki Koji 三重大学, 教養教育機構, 教授 (60362331)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 母語獲得 / 普遍文法 / 極小主義

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study addresses the question of whether early child English conforms to the VP-internal Subject Hypothesis. We first re-evaluate the evidence provided by Deprez & Pierce (1993) for the existence of VP-internal subject stage in the acquisition of English. Building on the syntactic analysis of the collocation why not? by Merchant (2006), we present evidence against D&P's assumption that children’s sentence-initial "no" is a marker for sentential negation. We then turn to Chomsky’s (2012a,b) minimalist analysis of subject-auxiliary inversion, and analyze children’s yes/no-questions based on that syntactic analysis. The results of our transcript analysis reveal that children acquiring English never produce any incorrect yes/no-question in which the most prominent element in the subject noun phrase undergoes inversion. This finding constitutes new piece of evidence that young children satisfy the requirement that subjects must first be merged internally to the predicate.

Free Research Field

母語獲得