CHILDREN'S POSSESSIVE STRUCTURES
Andrew Radford, University
of Essex, 1999
1.
POSSESSIVE 'S AND THIRD PERSON SINGULAR -S
Two- and three-year-old English children
generally go through a stage during which they sporadically omit possessive 's, so alternating between saying (e.g.)
Daddy's car and Daddy car. At roughly the same age, children also go through a
stage (referred to by Wexler 1994 as the optional
infinitives stage) during which they sporadically omit the third person
singular present tense +s inflection
on verbs, so alternating between e.g. Daddy
wants one and Daddy want one. The
question addressed in this paper is whether children's sporadic omission of
possessive 's is related to their
sporadic omission of third person singular present tense +s – and if so, how. This question is explored here primarily in
relation to data provided by a longitudinal study conducted by Joseph Galasso
of his son Nicholas between ages 2;3 and 3;6 (based on transcripts of weekly
recordings of Nicholas' speech production): see Radford and Galasso 1999.
Nicholas' speech production provides some prima
facie evidence of a relation between the acquisition of possessive 's and third person singular +s: prior to age 3;2, Nicholas used
neither possessive 's nor third
person singular +s in obligatory
contexts; it is only from age 3;2 on that we find both morphemes being used.
The table in (1) below shows the relative frequency of use of possessive 's and third person singular present
tense +s in obligatory contexts
before and after age 3;2:
(1) OCCURRENCE IN OBLIGATORY CONTEXTS
AGE 3SgPres +s
Poss 's
2;3-3;1 9/69 (0%) 0/118 (0%)
3;2-3;6 72/168 (43%) 14/60 (23%)
Typical examples of nominals and clauses
produced by Nicholas at the relevant stages are given in (2) and (3) below:
(2)(a)
That Mommy car (2;6). No Daddy plane (2;8). Batman (2;11, in reply to
`Whose it is?').
It Daddy bike, no Baby bike. Where Daddy car? (3;0)
(b) Daddy's turn (3;2). It's
the man's paper (3;4). It's big boy Nicholas's. It's Tony's. What's
the girl's name? Where's Zoe's bottle? (3;6)
(3)(a)
Baby have bottle (2;8). No Daddy have Babar (2;9). The car go (2;11).
The other one
work (3;0). Here come Baby (3;1)
(b) Yes, this works. This
car works. It hurts. The leg hurts. Barney leg hurts. It rains (3;2)
The data in (1-3) suggest a potential parallel
between the acquisition of third person singular +s and possessive 's, and
raise the obvious question of why there should be such a parallel2.
From a morphological perspective, such a
parallel would not be unexpected, given that possessive 's and third person singular +s
(e.g. the contracted form 's of the
auxiliary is) have the same range of
overt allomorphs: cf.
(4) ALLOMORPH AUXILIARY
POSSESSIVE
/s/ Pat's coughing Pat's cough
/z/ Teddy's coughing Teddy's cough
/iz/ Madge's
coughing Madge's cough
Moreover, there are also potential syntactic
parallels between the two. Under the analysis of clause structure assumed in
Chomsky 1981 and much subsequent work, a clause such as Pat's coughing would contain an IP projection of the simplified
form (5) below:
(5)
[IP Pat [I 's] coughing]
with the auxiliary 's encoding both present tense and agreement with a third person
singular subject-specifier like Pat.
Under the analysis of possessive structures in Kayne (1994, p.105), a nominal
structure such as Pat's cough would
likewise contain an IP projection with the simplified structure (6) below (with
I being a nominal rather than a verbal inflectional head):
(6)
[IP Pat [I 's] cough]
and it might be argued that 's serves to encode agreement with a third person (singular or
plural) possessor such as Pat.
(Similar analyses of English possessive structures are found in Chomsky 1995
p.263, Zribi-Hertz 1997, and Radford 1997 p.278.) This is by no means
implausible from a universalist perspective since we find a variety of
languages which overtly mark possessor agreement: languages as diverse as American
Sign Language, Dutch and Turkish have possessor agreement structures
paraphraseable in English as `Daddy his car', `Mummy her car', etc.
2.
CASE, AGREEMENT AND UNDERSPECIFICATION
If both possessive 's and third person singular +s
are reflexes of an agreement relation between an infectional head and its
specifier, an obvious suggestion to make is that omission of third person
singular +s and possessive 's may both reflect agreement failure
(i.e. failure to encode the agreement relation between an inflectional head and
its specifier). In the terminology
of Schütze and Wexler (1996) s-less forms may be the result of the
relevant inflectional head being underspecified
with respect to the specifier-agreement features it carries. In simplified
schematic terms, we might say that clausal structures like Mummy's driving contain an IP of the simplified form (7a) below
(with INFL carrying agreement features matching those of its
subject-specifier), and the the corresponding s-less clause Mummy driving
has the partial structure (7b) (with INFL being underspecified in respect of
its subject-agreement features):
(7)(a)
[IP Mummy [I +agr 's] driving]
(b) [IP Mummy [I –agr ø] driving]
In much the same way, we might suggest that
possessive structures like Mummy's car
contain an IP projection like (8a) below headed by an inflectional node fully
specified for agreement with its possessor-specifier Mummy, whereas s-less
possessives like Mummy car contain an
IP projection like (8b) below with an inflectional head which is underspecified
with respect to agreement with its possessor-specifier3 (In both
cases, INFL can be assumed to carry interpretable features marking possession
and definiteness, so that both structures are paraphraseable as `the car
belonging to Mummy'):
(8)(a)
[IP Mummy [I +agr 's] car]
(b) [IP Mummy [I –agr ø] car]
A further assumption made in (7/8) is that 's is
only used where INFL is fully specified in respect of its agreement properties;
otherwise, INFL is null4.
The assumption that s-less forms may be the result of agreement underspecification has
interesting implications for the case-marking of the specifier in both nominal
and clausal structures. Schütze (1997) argues that there is a cross-linguistic
correlation between case and agreement (e.g. that an INFL which is specified
for subject-agreement has a nominative subject). Making rather different
assumptions from his (for reasons which do not affect the conclusions drawn
here), let us suppose that adult English has the following case system:
(9)
An overt (pro)nominal is:
(a) nominative if in an agreement relation with a verbal INFL
(b) genitive if in an agreement relation with a nominal INFL
(c) objective otherwise (by default)
If we further assume (following Schütze and
Wexler) that children have acquired the morphosyntax of case and agreement by
around two years of age, and that two- and three-year old children go through a
stage during which functional heads are optionally underspecified with respect
to the features they encode, we can provide a straightforward account of why
two- and three-year olds alternate between forms like I'm playing and Me playing.
The two types of clause would have the respective (partial) structures (10a/b)
below:
(10)(a)
[IP I [I +agr 'm] playing]
(b) [IP Me [I –agr ø] playing]
Since INFL is fully specified for agreement in
(10a), the overt auxiliary 'm is
used, and the subject is nominative by (9a). But since INFL is underspecified
with respect to agreement in (10b), it remains null and has a default objective
subject by (9c).
If – as suggested in (8a/b) above – possessive
nominals contain an IP headed by an INFL which may either be fully specified or
underspecified for agreement, we would expect to find a similar alternation
between nominal structures like (11a) below with genitive possessors and those
like (11b) with objective possessors:
(11)(a)
[IP my [I +agr ø] dolly]
(b) [IP me [I –agr ø] dolly]
In (11a), INFL is fully specified for agreement
with its possessor-specifier my and
so the possessor has genitive case by (9b); but in (11b), INFL is
underspecified for agreement, and so its possessor-specifier me has objective case by (9c). In both
structures, INFL is null because 's
is used only where the specifier is third person.
In short, the assumption that children's
possessive structures may optionally be underspecified with respect to
agreement with the possessor-specifier predicts that children who go through
such an underspecification stage in the acquisition of possessives should
alternate between structures with genitive and objective possessors. In
sections 3-5 below, we argue that this is indeed
the case for Nicholas, examining his use of
first, second and third person possessors in turn.
3.
FIRST PERSON POSSESSORS
If we look at the earliest first person singular
possessor structures produced by Nicholas, we find that objective me possessors predominate at ages
2;6-2;8, and that genitive possessives (viz. the weak form my and the strong form mine,
with occasional early confusion between the two) are initially relatively
infrequent, but gradually become more and more frequent until they predominate
by age 3;0. The table in (12) below shows the relative frequency of objective
and genitive possessors used by Nicholas at various ages:
(12)
Frequency of occurrence of first person singular possessors
AGE OBJECTIVE ME
GENITIVE MY/MINE NOMINATIVE I
2;6-2;8 53/55 (96%) 2/55 (4%) 0/55 (0%)
2;9 11/25 (44%) 14/25 (56%) 0/25 (0%)
2;10 4/14 (29%) 10/14 (71%) 0/14 (0%)
2;11 5/24 (21%) 19/24 (79%) 0/24 (0%)
3;0 4/54 (7%) 50/54 (93%) 0/54 (0%)
3;1-3;6 6/231 (3%) 225/231 (97%) 0/231 (0%)
Typical examples of first person singular
possessor structures produced by Nicholas are given below:
(13)(a)
That me car. Have me shoe. Me and Daddy (= `Mine and Daddy's').
Where me car? I want me car. I want me bottle. I want me woof (2;6-2;8)
(b) I want me duck. That me
chair. Where me Q-car? No me, Daddy
(= `It isn't mine, Daddy'). Me pasta. Mine pasta. My pasta. It my key. It my (= `It's
mine'). No book my (= `The book
isn't mine')
(c) It is my TV. Where is my
book? Where is my baseball? Don't touch
my bike. I want
my key. It's my money (3;0)
In terms of the analysis outlined in (11) above,
the picture which the data in (12) seem to suggest is that the possessive
structures produced by Nicholas are initially predominantly underspecified for
possessor-agreement, with agreement gradually being specified more and more
frequently (until it exceeds the traditional 90% correct use threshold by the
time he is 3 years of age).
Interestingly, there are potential parallels to
be drawn with Nicholas' use of first person singular subjects. As the examples
in (14) below illustrate, Nicholas alternates between nominative and objective
subjects in his early clause structures:
(14)(a)
I am me. I am Batman. I'm sick (2;8). I am Batman. I am Q. I am car
(2;9)
(b) Me Q (2;8 = `I am Q').
Me in there (= `I'm in there'). Me car (= `I'm a car'). Me wet
(= `I'm wet') (2;9)
The table in (15) below shows the relative
frequency of I and me subjects in copular sentences:
(15)
Frequency of I/me subjects in
copular sentences
AGE NOMINATIVE I
OBJECTIVE ME
2;6-2;8 10/14 (71%) 4/14 (29%)
2;9 15/19 (79%) 4/19 (21%)
2;10-3;0 51/55 (93%) 4/55 (7%)
3;1-3;6 105/111 (95%) 4/111 (5%)
In terms of the agreement-underspecification
analysis, clauses such as I'm sick
and Me wet might be argued to have
the respective simplified structures (16a/b) below:
(16)(a)
[IP I [I +agr 'm] sick]
(b) [IP Me [I –agr ø] wet]
In (16a) INFL is fully specified for agreement
and so is realised as 'm and has a
nominative subject I by (9a), whereas
in (16b) INFL is underspecified for agreement and so has a null realisation and
an objective subject me by (9c). (In
both structures, INFL might be taken to be specified for present tense.) The
data in the tables in (12) and (15) would suggest that subject-agreement is
acquired more rapidly than possessor-agreement: this may (in part) reflect
the fact that agreement with a first person singular
subject is overtly encoded on INFL (by use of am/'m), whereas agreement with a first person singular possessor is
not overtly encoded on D (which is null).
4.
SECOND PERSON POSSESSORS
If we turn now to look at structures with second
person possessors, we find that these only appear in the transcripts from 3;2
onwards. The predominant second person possessor form is initially you, but this is gradually ousted by your over the next few months, as the
figures in the table below illustrate:
(17)
Frequency of second person
possessors
AGE YOU
YOUR
3;2-3;4 14/16 (88%) 2/16 (12%)
3;5 7/34 (21%) 27/34 (79%)
3;6 2/29 (7%) 27/29 (93%)
Typical examples of second person possessor
structures produced by Nicholas are given below:
(18)(a)
No you train. (= `It's not your train'). No it's you train, no (idem).
No you baby, Mama
baby. This is you pen (3;2)
(b) That's your car. It's you elephant. It's you turn. It's you
kite. It's you plane. I got you
plane. Close your eyes. It you house? No it's you house. Where's you
house? Where's
you bed? Where's your friend? (3;4)
It seems reasonable to suppose that your possessors are genitive (as in
adult English), and that (since Nicholas never uses nominative possessors) you possessors are objective. In terms
of the analysis proposed here, nominals like your car/you car would have the partial structures (19a/b) below:
(19)(a)
[IP your [I +agr ø] car]
(b) [IP you [I –agr ø] car]
In (19a), INFL is fully specified for agreement
with its second person possessor-specifier and so the possessor your has genitive case by (9b); but in
(19b), INFL is underspecified for agreement, and so its possessor-specifier you has objective case by (9c). INFL is
null in both (19a) and (19b) because the overt possessive morpheme 's is used only where the possessor is
third person.
Although we might expect to final a parallel
change from objective to nominative subjects in clausal structures, we clearly
cannot test this empirically in any straightforward fashion, because the
pronoun you serves a common
nominative/objective function.
5.
THIRD PERSON POSSESSORS
The only other pronominal possessors used by
Nicholas are the third person masculine singular forms him/his, which first appear in the transcripts at age 3;6. 10/13
(77%) of the relevant structures have an objective him possessor, the remaining 3 (23%) having a genitive his possessor. An exhaustive list of the
relevant structures is given in (20) below:
(20)(a)
It's him house. It's him hat (x2). Him eye is broken. Him bike is
broken. I want to go in
him house. Help him legs. What's him name? (x3)
(b) What's his name? (x3)
In terms of the analysis presented here,
nominals such as his name/him name
would have the respective (simplified) structures (21a/b) below:
(21)(a)
[IP his [I +agr ø] name]
(b)
[IP him [I –agr ø] name]
We find a genitive his possessor by (9b) in (21a) where INFL is fully specified for
possessor-agreement, and an objective him
possessor by (9c) in (21b) where INFL is underspecified for agreement.
An obvious question to ask is whether we find
parallels between third person singular masculine possessors and third person
singular masculine subjects. Typical copular clauses with third person singular
pronoun subjects produced by Nicholas at 3;6 are illustrated below:
(22)(a)
Here's him. Where's him? Him is alright. Him is my friend. Him is a big
woof-woof.
Him is hiding. What's him doing? Where's him going? Where's him? Where
is him?
(b) What him doing? Him
blue. Him alright. Him dead. Him my friend. Him not my
friend.
(c) He's happy. He's bad. He
is a bad boy. He's in there.
(d) He happy. He a elephant
25/32 (78%) of the copular sentences within
third person singular subjects produced by Nicholas at 3;6 have objective him subjects (a figure comparable to his
77% use of him possessors), with the
remaining 7/32 (22%) having nominative he
subjects (compared to 23% use of his
possessors). This is clearly consistent with our view that possessors and subjects
show a related pattern of development5.
6.
WIDER IMPLICATIONS
We can summarise the range of possessive
structures used by Nicholas in the following terms. We find the same overall
pattern of development with all three types of pronominal possessor which he
uses: in each case, the earliest possessive nominals he produces predominantly
show objective (me/you/him)
possessors, and these are gradually ousted by genitive (my/your/his) possessors. Under the analysis suggested here, the
transition from objective to genitive possessors reflects the transition from
an early nominal structure with an inflectional head lacking
possessor-agreement features to a later nominal structure with an inflectional
head specified for agreement. If (following Kayne) we take possessive 's to be a possessor-agreement
inflection, there are obvious parallels here with the development of s-possessives: as we saw in (1-2) above,
the earliest nominal possessor structures produced by Nicholas are s-less forms like Daddy car, and these are clearly consistent with the view that
children's early possessive nominals contain an IP with an inflectional head
which is underspecified for possessor-agreement.
Moreover, there are interesting potential
parallels between the development of possessor+noun structures and subject+verb
structures. Just as Nicholas fails to mark possessor agreement at all in
nominal structures like Baby bottle
until age 3;2 (and thereafter goes through a period of optionally marking
possessor-agreement), so too he similarly fails to mark subject-agreement in
clausal structures like Baby have bottle
until 3;2 (and thereafter goes through a period of optionally marking
subject-agreement). Similarly, just as we find a transition from nominal
structures with objective possessors (like me
car, you car and him car) to structures with genitive
possessors (like my car, your
car, his car), so too we find
a parallel transition from clausal structures with objective subjects (like Him naughty) to structures with
nominative subjects (like He's naughty).
If we assume that genitive and nominative case are checked via an agreement
relation with a nominal and verbal inflectional head respectively whereas
objective case is a default form used in agreementless structures, the gradual
change from objective possessors and objective subjects to genitive possessors
and nominative subjects reflects a parallel change from a structure headed by
an agreementless INFL to one fully specified for subject-/possessor-agreement.
What all of this underlines is that the
acquisition of case and agreement is a protracted process involving three
(idealised) major stage. In the initial stage, agreement is rarely marked (and
marked only on those lexical items for which he has acquired the relevant
morphology): consequently, subjects and possessors typically carry default
objective case, and there is little use of nominative subjects or genitive
possessors. In the second stage, agreement is optionally marked: subjects carry
nominative case and verbs carry third person singular +s if agreement is marked, but subjects carry default objective
case and verbs don't carry third person singular +s if agreement is not marked6; likewise, possessors
carry genitive case and the possessive inflection 's is used if possessor-agreement is marked, but possessors have
default objective case and no 's is
used if agreement is not marked. In the third stage, children attain adult-like
competence, and mark agreement in obligatory contexts, resulting in the correct
use of genitive possessors, nominative subjects, possessive 's and third person
singular s in obligatory contexts.
Not surprisingly, the somewhat idealised picture
painted above is complicated by lexical factors (i.e. by the fact that
different lexical items are acquired at different ages). For example, genitive my appears in the earliest transcripts, your first appears at 3;2, and his at 3;6; likewise possessive 's and third person singular +s both appear at 3;2 (though the
irregular first person singular forms am/'m
appear at 2;8). The obvious consequence of this is that during stage 2 (i.e.
the optional agreement stage), children's grammars license both
agreement-specified and agreement-underspecified structures, but the relevant
agreement structures can only be produced if the child has the lexical
resources to realise them. So, for example, at age 3;0 Nicholas is at the
optional agreement stage and so would be expected to alternate between
possessive nominals like my car/me car,
and Daddy's car/Daddy car: but
because he has acquired both me and my (but not possessive 's) at this stage, the actual range of
possessive structures he produces is my
car/me car/Daddy car. A further complicating factor is that when a new
pronoun form is acquired, it can take several months before it is used
productively. It seems likely that newly acquired items are initially difficult
to access (becoming easier as time goes by), and this is why we find the
observed pattern of a gradual increase in the frequency of their use.
The overall conclusions which the research
reported on here leads to are the following. There is an interesting symmetry
between the development of subject+verb structures on the one hand and
possessor+noun structures on the other. Nicholas seems to pass through an initial
no inflection stage during which subject-agreement and possessor-agreement are
not marked (a stage characterised by the use of objective possessors/subjects
and the omission of possessive 's and
third person singular +s). At around
the age of 2;6 he seems to enter an optional agreement stage at which he
alternates between agreement-specified forms like my car and I'm sick and
agreementless forms like me car and Me wet: however, the fact that different
lexical items are acquired at different ages means that some
agreement-specified forms (like Daddy's
car and It works) appear later
than others. This optional inflection stage lasts until the end of the
transcripts at 3;6 (though by then agreement forms are generally well
established and strongly preferred where lexical resources permit and where an
item is well enough established not to cause retrieval problems). The overall
conclusion we reach is that the optional infinitives stage which two- and
three-year-old children go through should more properly be thought of as an optional agreement stage during which both nominal and verbal inflectional
heads may be underspecified in respect of the agreement features they encode.
7.
EVIDENCE FROM SLI
Interestingly, the analysis presented here is
consistent with the findings from a study by Ramos and Roeper (1995) of an SLI
child (JC) between ages 4;4 and 4;6. JC alternates between objective and
genitive possessors (e.g. 56% of his first person singular possessors are
objective me and 44% genitive my), but has 0% use of possessive 's and third person singular +s in obligatory contexts. Examples of
JC's objective subjects/possessors are given in (23a/b) below:
(23)(a)
Me like ketchup. Me don't know. Me said me gotta hurry up and go. Her
can cook
something. Them have a party, and a clown give me a balloon. That why
them put a lot
of sand.
(b) Me daddy like mustard.
Me sister name Dawnne. He shoveled him truck. Them mom
could let them play outside. Me mom put in here, cook them, forgot to
take them eyes
out.
It would seem that JC is more or less at the
same stage which Nicholas reached at 2;9. In order to demonstrate that the use
of me possessors is a competence
error (reflecting a grammatical deficit – more specifically, an agreement
deficit) rather than a performance error (resulting from e.g. retrieval failure
in the sense of Rispoli 1994, 1995, 1997), Ramos and Roeper conducted a
comprehension experiment on JC in which he was asked to match sentences with
pictures denoting possession or action. They note that in response to the
following test sentences:
(23)
The girl saw me paint/dress/bat/ski
in 4 out of 5 cases JC pointed to pictures
denoting possession, suggesting that his grammar systematically licenses
objective possessors. In terms of the framework adopted here, objective
possessors indicate a failure to mark possessor-agreement; and likewise
objective subjects indicate a failure to mark subject-agreement.
8.
EVIDENCE FROM CHILD DUTCH
Although the research reported here is based on
a longitudinal study of the acquisition of English, there is some evidence
which suggests that children acquiring other languages may go through a
parallel agreement-underspecification stage in the acquisition of possessives.
Hoekstra and Jordens (1994) report on a longitudinal study of a Dutch child
(Jasmijn), noting (p.141) that the earliest possessive structures which she
produces involve a possessor which is either a bare s-less nominal (which could be taken to be an objective nominal) or
an objective pronoun. They also observe that the possessor can undergo a
phenomenon which they refer to as subscrambling, resulting in discontinuous
possessive structures such as:
(25)(a)
Cynthia is dat niet pyama (Jasmijn 2;5)
Cynthia is that not pyjamas
`Those are not Cynthia's pyjamas'
(b) Cynthia mag mij niet navel zien
Cynthia may my not bellybutton see
`Cynthia can't see my bellybutton'
Within the framework adopted here, the use of an
objective possessor would indicate the lack of possessor-agreement features
carried by the head D of DP. Indeed, it may be that it is the absence of
possessor-agreement which allows the subscrambling of the possessor in child
Dutch: in this connection, it is interesting to note that Verkuyl and
Bende-Farkas (1997, p.5) claim that principles of UG prevent a possessor from
being extracted when it is in an agreement relation with its head.
9.
EVIDENCE FROM CHILD KOREAN
A further potential parallel is suggested by
research into the acquisition of Korean by Lee (2000). In adult Korean,
possessors may carry genitive case, and this is marked by the case-suffix +uy (e.g. the genitive form of Emma `Mum' is Emma-uy `Mum's'). Lee undertook a longitudinal study of three
Korean children: Nohen from 1;7 to 1;10, Younguk from 1;7 to 2;0, and Zenhen
from 2;3 to 2;4. She reports that the three children in her study frequently
omitted the genitive case-particle in possessive structures, preferring to use
bare possessors rather than genitive possessors (e.g. saying Emma cha `Mum car' rather than Emma-uy cha `Mum's car'). In fact 42/43
(98%) of the possessive structures produced by Zenhen involved the use of bare
possessors, 398/415 (96%) of those produced by Nohen, and 29/60 (48%) of those
produced by Younguk. What is particularly interesting about the bare possessors
produced by Korean children is that they don't carry objective case (because
they lack the objective case-particle –lul)
but rather seem to be caseless D constituents (e.g. bare pronouns) or DP
constituents (e.g. bare nominals). This in turn raises the possibility that
possessive structures in early child English like Daddy car may involve the use
of a caseless possessor, rather than an objective possessor.
At first sight, this suggestion might seem to be
difficult to reconcile with the fact that English children produce possessives
like me car, where the pronoun me might be assumed to carry objective
case. However, Radford (1990) argued that such pronouns in `small clause'
structures like Me wet in early child
English are caseless forms. Indeed, it might be claimed that the same is true
of the adult counterpart of me – at
least in sentence fragments such as that italicised below:
(26)
Who is going to get the blame? Me?
Here, the sentence-fragment me does not occur within the domain of any case-checker and so (if
indeed me did carry objective case)
would have no obvious means of checking its case (thereby causing the relevant
derivation to crash at LF by virtue of containing an uninterpretable case
feature). Analysing adult me sentence
fragments and child me possessors as
caseless forms which don't enter into any agreement relation with a functional
head would be consistent with the view that case is universally checked by
agreement, and conversely that in the absence of agreement, there is no case.
10.
FOOTNOTES
1. An earlier version of this paper was
presented to the annual convention of the American Speech and Hearing
Association by the first author in Boston in November 1997; a revised version
was presented in Radford and Galasso 1999.
2. It seems clear that the relevant errors are
not phonological in nature, since Nicholas (during the period covered by the
study reported here) does not omit word-final sibilants, or the noun plural +s inflection. Moreover, it seems
self-evident that any attempt to account for the relevant data in terms of an
inability to articulate final sibilants would not generalise to possessives
such as me car, you train and him house
(which were produced by Nicholas alongside bare nominal possessives such as Daddy car).
3. Following Schütze and Wexler 1996, the
notation [+agr] is used as an informal way of indicating that INFL carries a
set of person/number features which agree with those of its specifier.
Conversely, I shall use the notation [–agr] to indicate the absence of such
specifier-agreement features. The discussion here is simplified in various
respects, for ease of exposition. For example, we have marked only whether INFL
carries agreement features or not, and not represented other features (e.g.
tense) carried by INFL. We have also ignored the possibility that structures
like (7b) may equally result from underspecification of the tense properties of
INFL – as claimed in Schütze and Wexler (1996).
4. Earlier analyses of child possessives such as
Daddy car (e.g. Radford 1990) took
them to be NPs with a structure along the lines of:
(i)
[NP Daddy [N' [N car]]]
in which the bare possessor Daddy functions as
the specifier of the head noun car.
However, an NP analysis along the lines of (i) proves problematic in numerous
ways. For one thing, the unary-branching N-bar constituent posited in (i) is
incompatible with the assumption made in Chomsky (1995) that all syntactic
structure is binary-branching. Secondly, it is not obvious how a structure like
(i) would account for the fact that bare possessive structures like Daddy car have a definite interpretation
(paraphraseable as `the car belonging to Daddy'), since definiteness is a
D-property rather than an N-property. And thirdly, an NP analysis like (i)
would provide no obvious account of the fact that bare possessors precede
attributive adjectives in child structures such as the following (produced by a
boy called Knox at 3;6):
(ii)
Daddy old car. Not Daddy big car, Daddy old car. Daddy big car
If (following Cinque 1994) we posit that
attributive adjectives serve as specifiers of a functional projection
positioned between D and N, it follows that the spec-NP analysis of possessors
in (1) would wrongly predict that children produce bare possessive structures
like:
(iii)
[FP big [F ø] [NP Daddy [N car]]]
By contrast, a spec-DP analysis along the lines
of (iii) below would correctly predict that bare possessors precede attributive
adjectives:
(iii)
[DP Daddy [D ø] [FP big [F ø] [N car]]]
Moreover, the structure would be
binary-branching, and its definite interpretation (i.e. the fact that it paraphraseable
as `the big car belonging to Daddy') can be attributed to the presence of a
null (definite) determiner. For reasons such as these, we shall assume in this
paper that bare possessors are in spec-DP, not in spec-NP.
5. The data in (22a) and (22d) might at first
sight seem to call into question the claimed correlation between nominative
case and subject-verb agreement. After all, in (22b) we appear to have a verb
inflected for third person singular agreement used with an objective subject;
and in (22d) we appear to have a nominative subject in a clause which contains
no verb inflected for agreement. However, it should be noted in relation to
(22a) that Nicholas seems to use +s
essentially as a present tense inflection (not limited to use with third person
singular subjects), and hence produces sentences such as Here is me. Here is you. You is done. Where is you? Where you is?
There are potential parallels here with the use of +s as a present-tense marker in structures like Themuns is nice in dialects of Belfast
English (see Henry 1995). In relation to structures like (22d), it should be
noted that Schütze and Wexler claim that they involve a null INFL node which is
specified for agreement but unspecified for tense.
6. A minor complication is posed by the fact
that some children initially use +s
to mark present tense but not agreement, and so generalise it from use with
third person singular subjects to use with first person, second person and
third person plural subjects: see the discussion in footnote 5, and Radford
1998 for further exemplification and discussion. Similarly, some children
generalise possessive 's from use
with third person possessors to use with first and second possessors (see Chiat
1981): in such cases, 's seems to
mark possession and definiteness, but not agreement.
11.
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