Partial Constraint Ordering in Child French Syntax
Titel:
Partial Constraint Ordering in Child French Syntax
Auteur:
Legendre, Geraldine Hagstrom, Paul Vainikka, Anne Todorova, Marina
Verschenen in:
Language acquisition
Paginering:
Jaargang 10 (2002) nr. 3 pagina's 189-227
Jaar:
2002-07-01
Inhoud:
Reanalyzing production data from 3 French children, we make 2 basic points. First, we show that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition (in child French). Tense production starts and ends at near-adult levels but suffers a "dip" in production in the intermediate stage. Agreement develops linearly, going roughly from none to 100% over the same time. This profile suggests an analysis in which tense and agreement compete at the intermediate stage. Second, using a mechanism of grammatical development based on partial rankings of constraints (in terms of Optimality Theory; Prince and Smolensky (1993)), our analysis successfully models, over 3 stages, the frequency with which children use tensed, agreeing, and nonfinite verbs.