Stages rather than ages in the acquisition of movement structures: Data from sentence repetition and 27696 spontaneous clauses

This study explored the order of acquisition of various types of syntactic-movement and embedding structures in Hebrew, using a sentence-repetition task, in which 60 children aged 2;2-3;10 repeated 80 sentences (with a total of 4800 sentences), and an analysis of the spontaneous speech of 61 children aged 1;6-6;1 (27,696 clauses). The sentence repetition task revealed a set order of acquisition of the various types of syntactic movement: A-movement is acquired first, then A-bar-movement, and finally movement of the verb to C. The analysis of spontaneous speech revealed the same order: A-movement of the object of unaccusative verbs to subject position appears first, together with simple SV sentences; then, wh-questions appear, then relative clauses and topicalization, which appear together with embedding of finite clauses, and lastly, V-to-C movement. Previous studies have shown that Hebrew speakers under age six have difficulty comprehending and producing sentences with A-bar-movement in which a lexically-restricted object crosses over a lexically-restricted subject. And indeed, whereas children produced A-bar structures very early (wh-questions from age 1;6, relative-clauses and topicalization from age 2;6), until age 5;8 these structures never included a lexical DP crossing over another lexical DP. Both tasks indicated that the order of structure acquisition is fixed, creating Guttman scales between structures, but different children acquire the same structure at very different ages. It seems that whereas the syntactic path and the stages of structure acquisition along it are constant between children, each child walks this path in their own pace.

(a-)Topics and animacy

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we intend to contribute to the debate on the identification of the features to which syntactic locality expressed in terms of the featural Relativized Minimality/fRM principle appears to be sensitive (Rizzi 2004; Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi 2009); second, we aim at providing a better characterization of the distributional and interpretive properties of the process of a-marking in the Topic position of the Italian left periphery identified by syntactic cartography, in relation to (in)animacy (Belletti & Manetti 2018). To these aims, we examined the role of animacy in a production experiment eliciting left dislocated topics with 5-year-old children. To the extent that a-marking is related to a kind of affectedness of object topics (Belletti 2018a), we examined whether an inanimate left dislocated object could constitute a felicitous a-Topic. Furthermore, the question whether complexity effects are modulated in the computation of fRM in an animacy mismatch condition (between an inanimate left dislocated object and an intervening (animate) lexical subject) is also addressed within the context of ClLDs. Our results show that, in the tested animacy mismatch condition, children seldom a-marked the pre-posed object. Instead, they appeared to creatively explore other solutions to overcome the production of the hard intervention structure, mainly using null subjects. As children are not ready to compute the intervention configuration with a lexical preverbal subject, but could not naturally adjust it through a-marking of the inanimate topic, they ended up opting for different types of productions in which intervention was eliminated. If the animacy feature seems to be implicated in the process of a-marking to some extent, it is not a feature to which the fRM principle is sensitive in building the object A’-dependency in ClLD: we conclude, in line with previous work, that animacy is not among the features implicated in triggering syntactic movement (in Italian).

Predicate fronting in Yiddish and conditions on multiple copy Spell-Out

Predicate fronting with doubling (also known as the predicate cleft) has long been a challenge for theories of syntax that do not predict the pronunciation of multiple occurrences. Previous analyses that derive the construction via syntactic movement, including those attributing verb doubling to the formation of parallel chains (e.g., Aboh 2006; Kandybowicz 2008), are incompatible with remnant movement (Müller 1998), which does not give rise to doubling. This article presents data from the predicate fronting construction in Yiddish, in which verbs always double but complements never do. I argue that these seemingly contradictory pronunciation facts can be reconciled even if one assumes that phrasal movement and head movement are both syntactic. More specifically, the pronunciation of occurrences in Yiddish (doubled or not) follows from the general conditions on Spell-Out (or Transferpf) defined by Collins and Stabler (2016), modified only to accommodate syntactic head movement. Post-syntactic PF repairs are thus not required to account for the facts of the Yiddish predicate fronting construction. If such repairs are needed to generate doubling phenomena in other languages, they should be explicitly defined so as to modify or override the predictions of default Spell-Out conditions.

Introduction

This book focuses on the evolution of object clitics in the Romance languages (from now on, simply clitics). Cliticization is a major domain of research in the field of Romance linguistics. Furthermore, clitics raise many research questions that are of interest to general linguists working in any field of the discipline: phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, acquisition, pathology, etc. In fact, clitics offer clues or raise problems regarding a wealth of linguistic issues, including phonological domains, information structure, syntactic movement, and language impairments. Yet scholars are seldom aware of the many empirical facets of cliticization or have not fully considered the theoretical ramifications of the topic....

Correspondence between XPs and Phonological Phrases

Bresnan (1971, 1972) establishes an interaction between stress assignment and syntactic movement. We are interested in a restriction on this interaction. We argue that this restriction shows that the constraint STRESS-XP needs to be part of the syntax-prosody mapping and that it needs to be a restriction on a correspondence relation between syntactic XPs and phonological phrases. (A second constraint on the correspondence relation is either WRAP-XP or MATCH-XP.) In the course of our argument, we analyze Bresnan’s interaction between stress assignment and movement within an account in which Internal Merge induces reconstruction effects at both LF and PF.

Ways of smuggling in syntactic derivations

This chapter presents and discusses a number of derivations such as passive, causative, and passive in the causative voice / si-causative passive, which all involve movement of a chunk of the verb phrase containing the verb and its internal argument, yielding smuggling in Collins’s (2005) sense. The questions of what the engine of a smuggling derivation is and how the relevant chunk to be smuggled is identified guide the discussion. Evidence from acquisition is also considered where derivations involving smuggling appear to be at the same time more complex and more readily available to the developing child. The relevant chunks can be attracted by different types of heads in the clause structure, which all have the property of attracting syntactic movement into their specifier. Such heads may express features of different nature present in the clausal map, such as the passive and causative voice, as well as discourse-related features such as the (vP-peripheral) topic and focus features.

The Effect of Syntactic Impairment on Errors in Reading Aloud: Text Reading and Comprehension of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children show difficulties in reading aloud and comprehension of texts. Here, we examined the hypothesis that these reading difficulties are tightly related to the syntactic deficit displayed by DHH children. We first assessed the syntactic abilities of 32 DHH children communicating in spoken language (Hebrew) aged 9;1–12;2. We classified them into two groups of DHH children—with and without a syntactic deficit according to their performance in six syntactic tests assessing their comprehension and production of sentences with syntactic movement. We also assessed their reading at the single word level using a reading aloud test of words, nonwords, and word pairs, designed to detect the various types of dyslexia, and established, for each participant, whether they had dyslexia and of what type. Following this procedure, 14 of the children were identified with a syntactic deficit, and 15 with typical syntax (3 marginally impaired); 22 of the children had typical reading at the word level, and 4 had dyslexia (3 demonstrated sublexical reading). The main experiment examined reading aloud and comprehension of 6 texts with syntactic movement (which contained, e.g., relative clauses and topicalized sentences), in comparison to 6 parallel texts without movement. The results indicated a close connection between syntactic difficulties and errors in reading aloud and in comprehension of texts. The DHH children with syntactic deficit made significantly more errors in reading aloud and more comprehension errors than the DHH children with intact syntax (and than the hearing controls), even though most of them did not have dyslexia at the word level. The DHH children with syntactic deficit made significantly more reading errors when they read texts with syntactic movement than on matched texts without movement. These results indicate that difficulties in text reading, manifesting both in errors in reading aloud and in impaired comprehension, may stem from a syntactic deficit and may occur even when reading at the word level is completely intact.

The Scrambling Paradox

It has been commonly observed that scrambling and wh-movement share sensitivity to strong movement constraints ( Webelhuth 1989 , Saito 1992 , Bailyn 1995 ). At the same time, the two processes clearly differ in certain other respects, such as wh-island sensitivity, a finding that has inspired a range of analyses of scrambling as entirely distinct from better-understood movement processes ( Müller and Sternefeld 1993 , Bošković and Takahashi 1998 , among many others). Careful comparison of Ā-scrambling and overt wh-movement in a language that shows both (Russian) reveals that this seemingly paradoxical behavior can be captured effectively in a probe-goal theory of scrambling that obeys a form of Relativized Minimality defined across feature classes, following Rizzi 2004 . The resulting analysis exposes the distinct nature of strong and weak islands, with consequences for our understanding of the core architecture of syntactic movement.

Syntax of causative-passive correlation from a cross-linguistic perspective

Causatives and passives are two different types of syntactic constructions, but their interaction can be observed cross-linguistically. By investigating the causative-passive correlation in Chinese, English and French, we try to offer an appropriate account for the causative-passive correlation by specifying its necessary conditions. We argue that the constructions which involve the causative-passive correlation must be mono-phasal, and the embedded object can be co-referred to the matrix subject by syntactic movement.