Possessor Extraction in Child English: A Minimalist Account

Elena Gavruseva; Rosalind Thornton

This paper reports the results of an experimental study that investigated how young English-speaking children acquire questions with wh-possessive phrases such as 'whose hat'. It has been noted since Ross (1967) that adult English patterns with other Germanic languages in enforcing obligatory piedpiping of whose-phrases, as shown in (1): (1) a. Whose hat did he take? b. * Whose did he take hat? c. *Who did he take 's hat? The examples in (1) show that neither extraction of the genitive wh-possessor 'whose', nor extraction of the bare wh-possessor 'who' is allowed. By contrast, in languages like Hungarian, Tzotzil, & Russian, wh-possessors are free to optionally extract out of NP. The work of Chung (1991) on Chamono appears to suggest that there is a third alternative to pied-piping, namely, obligatory extraction of wh-possessors. We take these crosslinguistic facts to suggest that there exist three types of grammar with respect to possessor extraction possibilities: (A) Grammar Type A (Germanic languages): obligatory pied-piping, (B) Grammar Type B (eg, Hungarian): optional possessor extraction, & (C) Grammar Type C (eg, Chamorro): obligatory extraction. Given the parametric variation in extractability of wh-possessors, the purpose of the experiment was to investigate how English-speaking children converge on Grammar Type A. The Subset Principle (Berwick, 1985) predicts that children should start out with the most restrictive option that can be disconfirmed using positive evidence from the types of sentences found in the child's linguistic environment. Strictly speaking, both Grammar Type A (obligatory pied-piping) & Grammar Type C (obligatory extraction) can be viewed as subsets of Grammar Type B, where possessor extraction is optional. Thus, we can expect children to start out with an adult-like option or with a Chamorro-like option, which they later should discard in favor of obligatory pied-piping. Our experiment investigated precisely these predictions. 3 Tables, 16 References. Adapted from the source document

Possessor Extraction in Child English: A Minimalist Account

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