Abstract
Grammaticality judgements are the fundamental experimental source of generative linguistic theory. They may be difficult to elicit, especially in some populations, but generally they inform us neatly about what the grammar licenses or, on the contrary, bans. On the other hand, acceptability is multifactorial and therefore, unlike grammaticality judgement, can be quantified. In this paper I consider a particular empirical domain, that of Relativized Minimality (RM) in acquisition, and its relation to the dichotomy between grammaticality and acceptability. Friedmann et al. (2009) argued that children hold a stricter version of RM than adults. In particular, children would require a disjoint feature specification, not just a distinct feature specification, between target and intervener. The literature shows asymmetries in comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in various languages which fulfill the predictions of child RM. Variation between adults and children might be expected not only in production and comprehension, but also in grammaticality judgement. If so, children would be predicted to reject object relatives as well as the classic RM violations. Alternatively, if child RM is a processing effect, the prediction is that children would be able to tease apart object relative clauses from RM violations under favorable processing conditions. The question I address is: do children assimilate RM violations and object relative clauses? Grammaticality judgement should provide an answer to this question. In this paper I present an experiment targeting grammaticality judgement for object relatives and RM violations and report preliminary results for a group of 6-year-old Catalan-speaking children showing that object relatives and RM violations are not judged in a parallel fashion, since RM violations are rejected more often than object relatives.
Highlights
The literature on language acquisition has attested an asymmetry in the comprehension and production of relative clauses, object relative clauses lagging behind subject relative clauses
If we turn to individual results, all the children rejected at least one Relativized Minimality (RM) violation, while 10 children accepted all object relative clauses
I discuss the results in two respects: first, I consider age and performance in other tasks which, by hypothesis, relate to the one here; second, I go back to the question that motivated this study, namely, does child RM stem from a property of child grammar, defining grammaticality, or does it stem from processing limitations?
Summary
The literature on language acquisition has attested an asymmetry in the comprehension and production of relative clauses, object relative clauses lagging behind subject relative clauses (see, for English, Brown, 1971; De Villiers et al, 1979; for French, Labelle, 1990; for Portuguese, Corrêa, 1995; for Spanish, Pérez-Leroux, 1995; for German, Adani et al, 2013; for Italian, Contemori and Belletti, 2014, etc.). Friedmann et al (2009) proposed a new analysis for this well-known asymmetry: subject and object relative clauses differ in the position from which the wh- constituent moves, and they argued that children apply a stricter constraint on A’ movement than adults that renders object relatives (under specific conditions) difficult for them. The literature on language acquisition has attested an asymmetry in the comprehension and production of relative clauses, object relative clauses lagging behind subject relative clauses (see, for English, Brown, 1971; De Villiers et al, 1979; for French, Labelle, 1990; for Portuguese, Corrêa, 1995; for Spanish, Pérez-Leroux, 1995; for German, Adani et al, 2013; for Italian, Contemori and Belletti, 2014, etc.). Friedmann et al (2009) proposed a new analysis for this well-known asymmetry: subject and object relative clauses differ in the position from which the wh- constituent moves, and they argued that children apply a stricter constraint on A’ movement than adults that renders object relatives (under specific conditions) difficult for them. In this report I explore a prediction of Friedmann et al.’s hypothesis if one assumes that this stricter constraint on movement. The report is organized as follows: I detail Friedmann et al.’s hypothesis and state the prediction to test. In section Results, I present the results, and in section Discussion, I consider them against the background literature
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