The Question of Root Infinitives in Early Child Greek

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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons

IRCS Technical Reports Series Institute for Research in Cognitive Science

June 1996

Spyridoula Varlokosta University of Pennsylvania

Anne Vainikka University of Pennsylvania

Bernhard Rohrbacher Brown University

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Varlokosta, Spyridoula ; Vainikka, Anne; and Rohrbacher, Bernhard, "The Question of Root Infinitives in Early Child Greek" (1996). IRCS Technical Reports Series. 97. https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/97

University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-96-16.

This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/97 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Question of Root Infinitives in Early Child Greek

Abstract It is well known that children acquiring Germanic and Romance languages go through an early stage at which they produce declarative sentences with a Root Infinitive (cf. (1)) which would be ungrammatical in the adult language (Stern & Stern 1928, Weverink 1989, Pierce 1992, Wexler 1994). For languages outside of these language families, little work has been done on such Root Infinitives. In the present paper we investigate the status of Root Infinitives in Modern Greek, a language which lacks an infinitive form altogether.

Comments University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-96-16.

This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/97 Institute for Research in Cognitive Science

The Question of Root Inﬁnitives in Early Child Greek

Spyridoula Varlokosta, University of Pennsylvania Anne Vainikka, University of Pennsylvania Bernhard Rohrbacher, Brown University

University of Pennsylvania 3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228

June, 1996

Site of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Research in Cognitive Science

IRCS Report 96--16

The Question of Ro ot Innitives

in Early Child Greek

Spyridoula Varlokosta UniversityofPennsylvania

Anne Vainikka UniversityofPennsylvania

Bernhard Rohrbacher Brown University

May

Background

It is well known that children acquiring Germanic and Romance languages

go through an early stage at which they pro duce declarative sentences with a

Ro ot Innitive cf whichwould b e ungrammatical in the adult language

Stern Stern Weverink Pierce Wexler For languages

outside of these language families little work has b een done on suchRoot

Innitives In the present pap er weinvestigate the status of Ro ot Innitives

in Mo dern Greek a language whichlacks an innitive form altogether

a Mina einer gucken German Sabrina

Mina one lo okINF Clahsen PenkeParo di

b Gubb e vara dar Swedish Markus

oldman b eINF there Platzack

c Moi dessiner la mer French Daniel

me drawINF the sea Pierce

d Quetto qui mangiare chellini Italian Martina

this here eatINF piglets Guasti

Earlier versions of this pap er were presented at the th Annual Boston University

Conference on Language Development at the Language and Knowledge Conference

at Thessaloniki and at the Workshop on CurrentTrends in Mo dern Greek Syntax

at the th GLOW Conference Wewould like to thank the audiences for their

comments Thanks also to Sabine Iatridou and AnthonyKroch to the audience at the

Brown Linguistics Collo quiu m esp ecially Rolf Noyer and Pauline Jacobson as well as to

the Acquisition of Syntax Reading Group at the UniversityofPennsylvania for insightful

discussions Finallymany thanks to Filipp o Beghelli and George Ioannou for technical

assistance Any remaining errors are ours This work has b een supp orted by NSF Grant

SBR to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science

Table summarizes the rates of Ro ot Innitive use for some of the youngest

children discussed in the literature cf also Guasti Table and Sano

Hyams Table Ro ot Innitives are pro duced over of the

time by the Dutchchild Peter the Swedish child Markus and the French

child Nathalie in their earliest recordings Peter and Markus in their later

les resemble the pattern of the presumably more advanced Frenchchildren

Gregoire and Philipp e The Frenchchild Daniel and the two German children

fall in b etween these two groups in terms of their pro duction of Ro ot Innitives

Table Prop ortion of Ro ot Innitives RI

Language Child Age Prop ortion of RI Source

German Katrin R V

Nicole

Dutch Peter I Wijnen

Peter I I

Swedish Markus I R V

Markus I I

Markus I I I

French Daniel Pierce

Gregoire

Nathalie

Philipp e

Rohrbacher Vainikka

To account for the Ro ot Innitive phenomenon Boser Lust Santelmann

Whitman made an early prop osal that Ro ot Innitives are adult

like nite sentences apart from containing a null auxiliary or mo dal Wexler

showed based on a survey of the phenomenon across languages that

very young children know that nite verbs raise and nonnite verbs do not

raise cf also Pierce Poeppel Wexler Rohrbacher Vainikka

What the young children do not know is that a nonnite verb cannot

o ccur as a main verb Wexler suggested that this may b e due to childrens

insensitivity to tense distinctions at the relevantpoint in development Rizzi

on the other hand prop osed that the option of nonraising is due

to the p ossibility of p ositing a truncated tree lacking the TP and the CP

pro jection That is the structure of the Ro ot Innitive construction involves

a reduced tree what children at this p ointfailtoknow is that a nite clause

must contain a full CP pro jection

Our goal in this pap er is to determine whether there is an equivalentRoot

Innitive stage for children acquiring a language whichdoesnothaveanin

nitive construction namely Mo dern Greek We nd that in the typical Ro ot

Innitivecontexts Greek children use a verb form involving the sux i which

corresp onds to the rd p erson singular sux as well as the participle Wear

gue that the data are b est explained by treating the i form as the participle

thus suggesting that the relevantverb form need not b e an innitive Under

Rizzis approach wewould in fact exp ect various nonnite verb forms to b e

attested in the main clauses of the youngest sp eakers of various languages

Adult Greek

In this section we will review some asp ects of Adult Greek whichwillbe

relevant to the discussion following

The naconstruction

In mo dal and other emb edded contexts where languages such as English use

an innitive Greek makes use of a verb form intro duced by the particle na and

inected for sub jectverb agreement and asp ect as exemplied in This

construction is traditionally referred to as the sub junctive but throughout

this pap er we will refer to it as the naclause The particle na has typi

cally b een analyzed as a mo dal element Ingria PhilippakiWarburton

Veloudis Terzi among others in fact this view is supp orted by

the acquisition data we discuss b elow Alternatively na has b een treated as

a complementizer in some traditional grammars eg Andriotis as well

as in Agouraki and Tsoulas

a Boro na dhiavaso to vivlio

canSG NA readSUBJPERFSG the b o ok

I can read the b o ok

b Thelo na diavasi i Maria to vivlio

wantSG NA readPERFSG the MariaNOM the b o ok

ant Maria to read the b o ok I w

In addition to the emb edded context the naconstruction can also app ear

as a main clause in adult Greek with an optative or p olite imp erative read

ing Due to its innitiveli ke distribution the naconstruction is an obvious

candidate for the equivalent of the Ro ot Innitiveinchild Greek However

we will show b elow that the distribution of naclauses in child Greek clearly

diers from the distribution of Ro ot Innitives in other languages

Sub jectverb agreement

Greek regular verbs fall into two conjugation classes dep ending on whether the

nal syllable of the PresentTense is stressed or not The agreement paradigm

for the more common conjugation the one mainly attested in the child Greek

data with an unstressed nal syllable is providedinTable

Table The Greek agreement paradigm

present and future tense and naclauses

singular plural

st o omeume

nd is ete

rd i un

Asp ect and Tense

Greek is a language that makes an asp ectual distinction b etween Perfective

and Imp erfective Asp ect The asp ectual distinction shows up in the Past

Tense Imp erfect vs Aorist in the Future Tense Imp erfectiveFuture vs

PerfectiveFuture and in the naconstruction Imp erfective vs Perfective

naclauses

In the PresentTense there is no asp ectual distinction that is the Present

Tense always uses the Imp erfective stem Table illustrates the interaction of

asp ect and tense in Adult Greek

Table The interaction of asp ect and tense in Adult Greek for the verb

play with the imp erfective stem pez and the p erfective stem peks

imperfective perfective

Present pezo I play na

Past epeza I was playing epeksa I played

Imp erfect Aorist

Future tha pezo tha pekso

I will b e playing I will play

naclause na pezo na pekso

Thus the imp erfective form pezo is used in the na construction and in

the future construction as well as b eing the present tense imp erfective form

Similarly the p erfective form pekso is used b oth in the naconstruction and

in future tense In addition the p erfective form is used in conditional and

temp oral adjunct contexts

The comp ound tenses in Greek are formed using the verb exo have and

the active participle as shown in Table

In traditional grammars this form has b een referred to as the innitive However it

Table The Perfect Tenses in Adult Greek

PresentPerfect exo peksi I have played

Past Perfect ixa peksi I had played

Future Perfect tha exo peksi I will haveplayed

In the comp ound tense construction the auxiliary agrees with the sub ject

while the participle always o ccurs with the nonagreeing sux i The par

ticiple is formed using the p erfective stem and is homophonous with the rd

singular p erfective nonpast form This will turn out to b e relevant for the

analysis of Greek childrens earliest verb forms

The naconstruction in Child Greek

The naturalistic data wehave analyzed come from the Stephany Corpus of the

CHILDES database MacWhinney Snow Stephany Stephany

collected data from four children three of whichwehave concentrated on

ranging from age to The recordings from the fourth child show that

she is generally to o advanced for our purp oses b eing the oldest of the four

For the remaining three children two recordings were made with Spiros age

four with Janna starting at age and with Mairi starting at

age

Distribution of na in child Greek

Based on our insp ection of the earliest recordings it app ears that the na

construction is acquired early around age thus making it at rst glance a

plausible candidate for the Ro ot Innitive Furthermore in the earliest child

data naclauses typically app ear as main clauses unlike in the adult language

again a pattern similar to Ro ot Innitives

However in the earliest les of the twoyoungest children Spiros at

and Janna at the particle na is missing in the ma jority of cases as

exemplied in cf also Katis according to whom the earliest stage

of Child Greek contains no particles Janna at age pro duced just one

instance of an overt na out of a total of sentences with verbs excluding

the copula and Spiros pro duced phonologically reduced naparticles of a

total of sentences with verbs

has the distributio n of the participle in other IndoEurop ean languages in that it is used to

form comp ound tenses It diers from the IndoEurop ean innitive in failing to o ccur in the

mo dal and other emb edded control contexts Thus although this form develop ed from the

Classical Greek innitive it no longer b ears innitival function

ULL to magnitofono

the tap erecorder

JAN valume mesa

putPL inside Lets put it inside Janna le

In the later recordings of Janna at age and in Mairis recordings from

the b eginning from age on the naconstruction with an overt particle

is very frequent as exemplied in later recordings are not available from

Spiros Mairi in her rst le age pro duced instances of na out of a

total of sentences with verbs excluding the copula and mo dals whereas

Janna pro duced in one recording le age instances of naclauses

out of the ma jority of whichwere ro ot clauses

ULL ti tha kanume

what FUT doPL

What shall wedo

JAN na su litso alo

NA youGEN throwPERFSG other

Let me throwyou another one Janna le

Thus two stages are observable in the usage of na an early stage rep

resented by Spiros data and Jannas early data at age where the na

particle is apparently not pro ductively used and a later stage Jannas later

data at age and Mairis data where na is pro ductively used in nonadult

matrix clause constructions

Interestingly these two stages app ear to correlate with the general de

velopment of IPrelated elements Given that the naconstruction has b een

treated as a mo dal construction this is not surprising Thus as we shall see

in more detail b elow Spiros and Janna in her early recordings do not reveal

any evidence for having acquired tense marking mo dals or the agreement

paradigm On the other hand Janna in her later recording age pro duces

some mo dals and has a clearly pro ductiveFuture Tense with instances

and Past Tense with over instances as well as pro ductive agreement

Mairis earliest collected data represent a similar stage given that she pro

duces naclauses the Future Tense pro ductive agreement and mo dals from

her rst recording on

Arguments against the naconstruction as Ro ot Innitive

Although the naconstruction at rst glance app eared to b e a go o d candidate

for the Ro ot Innitive more detailed examination reveals a numb er of dier

ences b etween Ro ot Innitives in other languages and the naconstruction in

early Child Greek

First of all the naclause do es not mark the earliest attested sentence typ e

unlike Ro ot Innitives as suggested by the presence of an early stage where na

is not yet pro ductively used Furthermore given the relatively late emergence

of the na particle the prop ortion of naclauses with an overt na in the early

data is muchlower than the prop ortion of Ro ot Innitives in the early stages

of the languages describ ed in Table Spiros and Janna at pro duce

naclauses less than of the time and even Mairi at whose data we

take to represent a later stage only pro duces the naconstruction of the

time In contrast the Germanic children of the same age representedinTable

pro duce Ro ot Innitives more than half the time

Finally the emergence of the na particle at the same time as the Future

Tense agreement and mo dals suggests that naclauses reect a more advanced

stage than the Ro ot Innitive stage

Thus we prop ose that the status of na is the same in child Greek as in

adult Greek namely it is a mo dallike INFLelement The naconstruction is

acquired along with INFLrelated elements whereas the reverse situation holds

for Ro ot Innitives which tend to b e reduced in connection with the mastery

of INFLelements cf Clahsen Clahsen Penke Dueld

An intriguing question remains of why Greek children at our second stage use

the na construction as a matrix clause contrary to the adult language

isux in Child Greek The distribution of the

The overuse of the iform

Insp ection of the early data reveals that there is a verb form that is overused

namely the one marked with the sux i The overuse of this form has also

b een observed in traditional work by Katis and Stephany

as well as in Tsimpli In the literature the i form has

b een referred to as the rd singular p erson Recall however that this form is

ambiguous b etween the sg form of the verb in the most common conjugation

cf Table and the active participle cf Table

In the earliest recordings the three children wehave examined use the i

form even in sentences where the sub ject is clearly not sg as witnessed in

the examples in

Under Rizzis truncated tree approachwhichwe adopt in this pap er the matrix na

clauses can b e analyzed as truncated IPs with a lacking or undersp ecied CP consistent

with the general lackofemb edded structures at this stage in the acquisition data

Stephanys corpus is the same one we are using whereas Katiss observation is based on

data from dierentchildren Most of Tsimplis data come from the Stephany corpus also

a SPI tuto seli

this wantIMPERFSG I want this lit He wants this

ULL afto thelis

this wantIMPERFSG Do you want this

SPI afto seli

this wantIMPERFSG I want this lit He wants this

Spiros le

b MOT ti tha fas aghapi mu

what will eatPERFSG lovemy

What will you eat mylove

MAI fai

eatPERFSG I will eat lit She eats

MOT ti Tha fai

what will eatPERFSG What will she eat

MAI karab e

typ e of pastry kurab je Pastry Mairi le

c ULL etsi

likethis Like this

JAN nitsi tola

op enPERFSG now

you op en it now lit She op ens it now

JAN anitsi

op enPERFSG Op en it lit She op ens

ULL nitsi

op enPERFSG Op en it lit She op ens

JAN ne

yes Yes Janna le

The rst two examples show use of the sg instead of a sg sub ject

and the third example shows use of the sg instead of sg Example c

is comparable to the adult Greek usage of the sub junctive as an imp erative

However in the adult language a sg verb form would b e required rather

than Jannas sg

Suchoveruse makes the iform a plausible candidate for the role of Ro ot

Innitive In fact we will argue in this pap er that Greek childrens earliest

verb forms with the sux i corresp ond to the participle

The two stages of the iform

The developmental data from the three children reveals that there are two dis

tinct stages in the use of the i form in Early Child Greek The characteristics

of these two stages are summarized in tables and

During Stage I which corresp onds to the sp eech of Spiros at and Janna

at the iform is used over half the time Table Compare this with

the use of Ro ot Innitives bychildren acquiring other languages as shown in

Table Moreover a large prop ortion ab out of iforms is used in

nonsg contexts as shown in Table Contrast this pattern with German

or Italian where the sg is not overused although it is the rst nite form

acquired bychildren Clahsen Penke Meisel Pizzuto Caselli

Furthermore nonsg verb forms are very rare and not overgeneralized

Table For example Spiros only pro duced instances of a sg verb form

all of them in sg contexts Rather similarly Janna for whom wehave

longitudinal data pro duced sg verb forms only of the time at Stage I

as opp osed to of the time at Stage I I calculated on the basis of Tables

and Given the low prop ortion of nonsg forms there is little evidence for

the Agreement paradigm in this stage Finally there is no evidence for Tense

or Mo dals

During Stage I I on the other hand which corresp onds to the sp eechof

Janna at and Mairi at we observe a completely dierent pattern with

resp ect to the distribution of the iform Thus iforms are used much less than

at Stage I as shown in Table and most of them are used appropriately in sg

contexts Table Moreover the Agreement paradigm is used pro ductively

as indicated by the high prop ortion of the sg sg and pl verb forms in

Table In addition the Future Tense has clearly b een acquired and some

mo dals are attested

Table Distribution of the iform in sentences with verbs

excluding the copula and mo dals

Spiros Janna Janna Mairi

Stage I Stage I Stage I I Stage I I

iform

other

TOTAL

Table Prop ortion of correct vs incorrect uses of the iform

excluding the copula and mo dals

Spiros Janna Janna Mairi

Stage I Stage I Stage I I Stage I I

iform in sg context

iform in other contexts

TOTAL

Table The distribution of the nonsg verb forms

excluding the copula mo dals and imp eratives

SG SG PL PL PL

corr inc corr inc corr inc corr inc corr inc

Spiros Stage I

Janna Stage I

Janna Stage I I

Mairi Stage I I

The following summarizes the two stages

Stage I Spiros Janna

The iform used over half the time Table

A large prop ortion of iforms used in nonsgcontexts Table

Nonsg verb forms very rare and not overgeneralized Table

thus there is little evidence for the Agreement paradigm

No evidence for Tense or Mo dals

Stage I I Janna Mairi

iforms used much less than at Stage I Table

most iforms used appropriately in sg contexts Table

the Agreement paradigm used pro ductively Table

Future Tense and Mo dals have b een acquired

Arguments for the iform as the Early Nonnite

form

Evidence for nonniteness

Incompatibility with niteness

As wehave just seen at Stage I I the iform is rarely overgeneralized to nonsg

contexts rather it app ears to b e appropriately used as the sg Agreement

marker Wetake this to indicate that Stage I where the iform is frequently

overgeneralized represents the Early Nonnite Stage ie the Ro ot In

nitive Stage whereas Stage I I corresp onds to a stage where INFLrelated

functional pro jections are typically realized

On the other hand if the overgeneralized iform were a nite form we

would exp ect it to emerge along with other nite forms such as Mo dals and

verbs with pro ductiveTense and Agreement morphology In fact the distri

bution of the overgeneralized iform is in a sense the reverse of the nite verb

forms it is used at Stage I and practically disapp ears at Stage I I The fre

quency of the iform at the earliest observed stage and its decline at later stages

is comparable to the pattern of Ro ot Innitives observed in other languages

Null sub jects

Another piece of evidence in favor of the nonniteness of the iforms comes

from the distribution of empty and overt sub jects in child Greek The emer

gence of overt sub jects in child languages has b een claimed to b e asso ciated

with the acquisition of Agreement even in Null Sub ject languages suchas

Spanish or Mo dern Greek Grinstead for Spanish and Catalan cf also

Kramer for Flemish Dutch and German This suggests that ov ert

sub jects are licensed by a functional pro jection

In Spiross data the overgeneralized iform mostly o ccurs with an empty

sub ject cf also Tsimpli on null sub jects with agreement errors Overt

sub jects are predominantly used with correct Agreement as shown in Table

out of ie Thus an overt sub ject implies correct Agreement

while incorrect Agreement implies an empty sub ject Since sub ject distribu

tion dep ends on the presence vs absence of correct Agreement this argues

for two dierent sentence typ es Given the Romance data there is reason

to treat the predominantly null sub ject sentence typ e as an earlier develop

mental structure asso ciated with nonovert realization or nonrealization of

functional pro jections On the other hand the sentences with correct Agree

ment and an overt sub ject would involve the overt realization of functional

pro jections

Table The distribution of sub jects with sg verbs the iform

Spiros les

Null sub jects Overt sub jects TOTAL

Correct

Incorrect

TOTAL

The idea that the earliest stage correlates with the absence of overt sub jects

and no Agreement is further supp orted by Jannas data as shown in Table

We see that out of Jannas sub jects are null ie

Table The distribution of Jannas sub jects with sg verbs the iform

Null sub jects Overt sub jects TOTAL

Stage I

Stage I I

Since the overgeneralized iform rarely o ccurs with an overt sub ject con

trary to the situation with nite verbs this provides another argumentfor

treating the iform as an Early Nonnite form comparable to the Ro ot Inni

tive in other languages

Verb Raising

More evidence for treating the iform as an Early Nonnite form in Child

Greek could p otentially come from various diagnostics for Verb Raising such

as adverb placement p osition of Negation and word order

In the Early Greek data there are few temp oral adverbs Moreover they

o ccur either preverbally or p ostverbally and thus do not provide conclusive

evidence ab out Verb Raising Furthermore given that there are several options

for temp oral adverb placement in Adult Greek Alexiadou pp

the adverb data are not obviously relevant for determining Verb Raising

in Greek Similarly Negation in Adult Greek is not a diagnostic for Verb

Raising b ecause Negation precedes all verbal forms in the sentence

The p osition of the Sub ject is p otentially revealing the ma jorityofchil

drens early overt sub jects are p ostverbal ab out Tsimpli How

ever since p ostverbal sub jects might b e generated p ostverbally the strongest

evidence for Verb Raising would come from VSO orders In fact it turns out

that at Stage I this order is not attested cf also Tsimpli all p ostver

bal sub jects o ccur in VS sentences However if the sub ject is generated in a

preverbal SPEC VP p osition as it is reasonable to assume the VS orders do

provide evidence for raising to some functional pro jection at Stage I Given

the evidence from null sub jects and incompatibility with niteness we assume

that this pro jection is low in the tree presumably Asp ect Phrase see Section

b elow

Evidence for the Participle analysis The Perfective stem

Up to this p oint wehave seen arguments that the overgeneralized iform is a

nonnite form ie it do esnt raise as high as nite verbs Wewillnow turn

to evidence favoring the participial nature of this nonnite verb

An unexp ected pattern is attested in our data the overuse of the iform

is more prominentwiththePerfective stem than with the Imp erfective stem

as shown in Table ThusmorethanhalfofthePerfective iforms involve

incorrect uses of the isux Interestingly although there are some incorrect

uses of the iform with the Imp erfectivestemaswell ab out of the relevant

sentences it turns out that almost all of them out of involveverbs

that lack aPerfective stem ie verbs like kani do for which the stem kan is

used everywhere

Table The distribution of the iform with dierentstems

Spiros and Janna Stage I

Imp erfective Perfective

correct agr incorrect agr correct agr incorrect agr

Spiros

Janna

The usage of the Perfective stem is esp ecially surprising given that the

Imperfective stem is considered to b e the unmarked stem in Adult Greek cf

PhilippakiWarburton due to the fact that it is the only stem p ossible

in the PresentTense cf Table A straightforward explanation for the

usage of the Perfective stem is that the relevant nonnite form is in fact the

participle which in Adult Greek requires the Perfective stem and moreover

do es not agree with the sub ject

An analysis of the i sux as the participle has advantages over the tradi

tional analysis of the iform as a nite rd singular form Under the traditional

analysis the correlation b etween the Perfective stem and the overgeneralized

iform would remain unaccounted for along with the nonnite prop erties of

this form If this form were a nite rd singular form wewould not exp ect it

to co o ccur more with the Perfective stem rather than the Imp erfective form

Furthermore the analysis of the iform as the active participle is attractive

b ecause it makes the child Greek data more comparable to the Ro ot Innitives

in other languages which also involve a nonnite verb form cf Sano

Hyams for English

Discussion

Let us now consider the ramications of our ndings for the various analyses

prop osed in the literature for the Ro ot Innitive phenomenon

At rst glance the null auxiliary analysis of Boser et al seems

to explain the o ccurrence of the participle form since childrens nonnite

clauses are similar in form to the adult comp ound tense construction apart

from the lacking auxiliary exo have However this analysis predicts that

the participle is used in similar contexts as in Adult Greek namely in the

Perfect Tense cf Table This prediction clearly do es not hold since the

nonnite form is used bychildren in a wide varietyofcontexts most of them

incompatible with the adult Perfect context

A further problem with the null auxiliary analysis is that it fails to unify the

various nonnite forms attested in early child languages Under this approach

one would b e forced to assume that there is parametric variation b etween child

languages in terms of whether an auxiliary or a mo dal is omitted Note that

anull mo dal analysis is not p ossible for Child Greek since mo dals do not

select a participle In addition given the Greek data the theory would b e

considerably weakened by the fact that the semantics of the child construction

need not b e related to the corresp onding adult construction

According to a recent prop osal by Ho ekstra Hyams the under

sp ecication of Numb er Phrase is resp onsible for several phenomena in child

grammars including Ro ot Innitives the distribution of null sub jects and

omission of determiners Under this approach Ro ot Innitives are only found

in languages with imp overished p erson agreement In a language with rich

agreement such as Italian Ro ot Innitives are not exp ected Mo dern Greek

also has rich agreement according to their denition and rather than Ro ot

Innitives Child Greek is exp ected to demonstrate richpersonagreement

hnically true that Ro ot Inni from the earliest stages on Although it is tec

tives are not found in Child Greek since the language has no innitive form

we did not nd evidence in the pro duction data for the exp ected early p erson

A further p otential diagnostic for distinguish in g the participle analysis from the null

mo dal analysis comes from the distribution of the twosentential negators min whichis

used in mo dal contexts and dhen which is used elsewhere The early acquisition data contain

to o few examples to b e able to conclusivel y determine the form of the Negation However

Tsimpli rep orts an example which seems to supp ort the participial analysis over the

mo dal analysis Alexia ze ji mama NEG dhen leavePERFSG mommy Dont

leave mommy

Guasti has rep orted that the rate of Ro ot Innitives in early Italian is lower

than in the languages represented in Table However as Guasti p oints out fo otnote

this may b e due to the omission of participles from her calculations Given the Greek data

and the analysis prop osed here if the use of participial forms in early languages represents

the Ro ot Innitive Stage as well then the Italian pattern rep orted by Guasti may b e only

an epiphenomenon

agreement rather the ungrammatical iform is used in various contexts If

anything numb er agreementmay emerge earlier than p erson agreement given

that the second agreement ax after the rd singular acquired app ears to

b e the st plural ax cf Table On the other hand if the participle in

Child Greek corresp onds to the Ro ot Innitive attested in other languages

as we claim then Child Greek does have Ro ot Innitives contra Ho ekstra

Hyamss prediction Thus the undersp ecication of Numb er Phrase do es

not seem to b e able to explain the Early Nonnite Clauses in Greek

A more promising approach crosslinguistically is that of Rizzi ac

cording to whom the relevant form is a ro ot construction exhibiting whatever

unmarked nonnite form the language p ossesses p Within Rizzis

approach the participle analysis suggests that young children initially pre

fer the morphologically least marked wellformed item of the verbal paradigm

In languages like English or French this item is the innitive not marked for

agreement tense mo o d or asp ect In languages such as Greek this item is the

participle marked only for asp ect but not for agreement tense or mo o d Note

that the relevant notion of markedness involves abstract features not overt

markers since in Greek the p erfective participle b earing only an abstract

asp ect feature is homophonous with the rd singular p erfective b earing ab

stract agreement and asp ect features

Both Wexler and Rizzi have prop osed that Ro ot Innitives

reect a construction without verb raising Combining this idea with Rizzis

approach of the least marked morphological form wewould exp ect that young

children initially prefer trees that use or pro ject as little of the functional

hierarchy as p ossible That is given a standard tree suc hastheonein

from Belletti the unmarked nonnite form involves Verb Raising no

higher than to Asp ect Phrase that is b oth childrens early innitives and

participles would reect such a structure At the earliest stage the verb

do es not raise any higher than this children pro duce the morphologically

least marked wellformed form bysyntactically raising the verb to the lowest

inectional head This allows them to either not use or not even pro ject the

higher pro jections

AgrSP

Sp ec AgrS

AgrS

Sp ec T

T Mo o dP

Sp ec Mo o d

Mo o d AspP

Sp ec Asp

Asp VP

Sp ec V

In conclusion regardless of the fact that Adult Greek has no innitival

forms Greek c hildren at the earliest stages nevertheless use a participial form

which has the distribution of Ro ot Innitives in other languages This means

that the notion of Ro ot Innitive is to o narrow while a broader term such

as Early Nonnite Form is more appropriate

The Child Greek data supp ort the idea that children at an early stage con

struct sentences with an unmarked nonnite verb form Under the participial

analysis of the Child Greek iform it is p ossible to state such a crosslinguistic

generalization cf Rizzi The evidence for the nonnite participial

analysis of the iform comes from the incompatibility of this form with nite

elements in the developmental sequence from the distribution of null sub jects

and from the prominent use of the Perfective stem in the relevant construction

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