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Subjects, Sentential Negation and Imperatives in Child Spanish and Catalan UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Subjects, Sentential Negation and Imperatives in Child Spanish and Catalan A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Linguistics by John Allen Ray Grinstead 1998 © Copyright by John Allen Ray Grinstead 1998 The dissertation of John Allen Ray Grinstead is approved. _____________________________ Rochel Gelman _____________________________ Claudia Parodi-Lewin _____________________________ Susan Curtiss _____________________________ Anoop Mahajan _____________________________ Nina M. Hyams, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 1998 ii This dissertation is gratefully dedicated to: my wife, Jean, without whose love, support and tenacity, not a word would have been written; my daughter, Grace, and my son, Samuel, for their patience and perspective; my father, Hugh, for teaching me about research with his curiosity and constancy; my mother, Bonnie, for her passion for free thinking and tolerance of dissent. iii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................................xiv VITA....................................................................................................................................xix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION.......................................................................xxiii 1. Introduction .........................................................................................................1 1.1 EARLY MORPHOSYNTACTIC CONVERGENCE ....................................................1 1.2 PRINCIPLES OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR AND CHILD LANGUAGE .....................3 1.3 DISCOURSE COMPETENCE IN CHILD GRAMMAR ..............................................4 1.4 PREVIOUS WORK ON CHILD SPANISH AND CATALAN .....................................5 2. Research Methods and Data Collection ............................................................7 2.1 THE SPANISH ACQUISITION STUDY ..................................................................8 2.2 DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURE ......................................................................9 2.3 TRANSCRIPTION AND CODING ..........................................................................10 3. Subject Occurrence in Child Language ............................................................12 3.1 THE OCCURRENCE OF OVERT SUBJECTS IN CHILD CATALAN AND SPANISH ..12 3.1.1 Subjects of Non-Verbal Predicates ............................................................15 3.2 THE OCCURRENCE OF OVERT SUBJECTS IN CHILD OVERT SUBJECT LANGUAGES ...........................................................................................................16 3.3 A PREVIOUS ACCOUNT AND THE CURRENT PROPOSAL ...................................22 4. Subjects as Left-Peripheral Elements in Catalan and Spanish ......................24 4.1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................24 4.2 OVERT SUBJECTS AS LEFT-PERIPHERAL ELEMENTS ........................................26 iv 4.2.1 Ellipsis .......................................................................................................27 4.2.2 Negative Quantifier Extraction ..................................................................29 4.2.3 Quantifier Scope ........................................................................................31 4.2.4 Subjects as Topics ......................................................................................33 4.3 OVERT SUBJECTS AS LEFT-PERIPHERAL ELEMENTS IN CHILD SPANISH AND CATALAN ........................................................................................................39 4.3.1 The Emergence of the Left Periphery ........................................................40 4.3.2 Post- and Pre-verbal Overt Subjects Emerge Together ............................56 4.3.3 Topic-Focus Delay and Theories of Delay ...............................................62 4.3.4 Left-Peripheral Delay As a Discourse Deficit ...........................................67 4.3.5 Summary ....................................................................................................69 4.4 THE PRONOMINAL ARGUMENT HYPOTHESIS AND OVERT SUBJECT LICENSING ..............................................................................................................70 4.4.1Spanish and Catalan as Pronominal Argument Languages .......................72 4.4.2 Person Agreement and Root Non-finite Forms in Child Spanish and Catalan .........................................................................................................74 4.4.3 Early Morphosyntactic Convergence ........................................................88 4.5 SUBJECTS AND LEARNABILITY .........................................................................89 4.5.1 Learning Principles ...................................................................................89 4.5.2 Expletive Subjects ......................................................................................91 4.5.3 The Subset Principle Revisited ...................................................................92 4.6 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................93 v 4.7 THE DEVELOPMENT OF NUMBER AGREEMENT IN CHILD CATALAN AND SPANISH ..........................................................................................................95 4.8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF TENSE IN CHILD CATALAN AND SPANISH ..................103 5. Negation and Imperatives ..................................................................................112 5.1 NEGATION AND IMPERATIVES IN ADULT GRAMMAR ......................................116 5.1.1 Rivero and Terzi (1995) .............................................................................116 5.1.2 Other Theories of Negation and Imperatives .............................................121 5.1.3 Summary ....................................................................................................123 5.2 CLASS I AND CLASS II LANGUAGES .................................................................124 5.2.1 Spanish and Catalan as Class I Languages ...............................................124 5.2.2 Russian as a Class II Language .................................................................131 5.3 THE PROJECTION PROBLEM ..............................................................................137 5.4 NEGATION, IMPERATIVES AND RELATIVIZED MINIMALITY IN CHILD SPANISH AND CATALAN ........................................................................................................139 5.4.1 Grammatical Motivations For Overgeneralization ...................................143 5.4.2 Functional Motivations For Overgeneralization .......................................151 5.4.3 Early Convergence: Principles and Parameters in Child Spanish and Catalan .........................................................................................................153 5.4.4 Summary ....................................................................................................154 5.5 NEGATION, IMPERATIVES AND RELATIVIZED MINIMALITY IN CHILD RUSSIAN .................................................................................................................155 5.6 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................158 vi 6. References ............................................................................................................160 vii TABLES TABLE 1.1 - PHILLIPE’S PLACEMENT OF NEGATION WITH FINITE AND NON-FINITE VERBS (FROM PIERCE, 1989, P. 40)...............................................................................................1 TABLE 1.2 - ANDREAS’S PLACEMENT OF FINITE AND NON-FINITE VERBS IN V2 AND V- FINAL POSITION..................................................................................................................2 TABLE 3.1 - VERBS WITH NULL SUBJECTS VERSUS VERBS WITH OVERT SUBJECTS IN THE EARLY AND LATER STAGES OF CHILD CATALAN (CHI-SQUARE = 49.24. P < 0.000001. )...........................................................................12 TABLE 3.2 - VERBS WITH NULL SUBJECTS VERSUS VERBS WITH OVERT SUBJECTS IN THE EARLY AND LATER STAGES OF CHILD SPANISH (CHI-SQUARE = 20.54. P < 0.00001.)...............................................................................12 TABLE 3.3 - VERBS WITH NULL SUBJECTS VERSUS VERBS WITH OVERT SUBJECTS IN THE EARLY AND LATER STAGES OF THE CHILD ITALIAN OF ROSA, OF THE CALAMBRONE COR- PUS (CHI-SQUARE = 19.01. P < 0.001.)...........................................................................13 TABLE 3.4 - THE NUMBER OF FILES, MONTHS AND TOTAL VERBAL UTTERANCES PER EACH CATALAN-SPEAKING CHILD'S EARLY AND LATE STAGE...................................14 TABLE 3.5 - THE NUMBER OF FILES, MONTHS AND TOTAL VERBAL UTTERANCES PER EACH SPANISH-SPEAKING CHILD'S EARLY AND LATE STAGE.....................................14 TABLE 3.6 - THE MLUS OF THE FILES JUST PRECEDING THE FILES IN WHICH OVERT SUB- JECTS FIRST APPEARED IN CHILD CATALAN (AVERAGE = 1.48).................................17 TABLE 3.7 - THE MLUS OF THE FILES JUST PRECEDING THE FILES IN WHICH OVERT SUB- JECTS FIRST APPEARED IN CHILD SPANISH (AVERAGE = 1.53 )..................................17 viii TABLE 3.8 - OVERT VS. NULL SUBJECTS IN NINA’S FIRST 12 FILES..........................18
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