Abstract
In this article we discuss the development of functional structure in the early grammar of Greek. We first discuss the analysis of Varlokosta, Vainikka and Rohrbacher (VVR) (1998), who argue that Greek children (and by extension, all children) begin with a prefunctional grammar - a grammar that lacks functional categories. We show that the prefunctional grammar hypothesis is not empirically supported by the acquisition data and that Greek children, like other children that have been studied in detail, converge very quickly on the morphosyntax of the adult language. Next, we focus on a particular construction of early Greek identified by VVR that resembles the root infinitives found in other child languages. We refer to this construction as the bare perfective. We reject VVR's characterization of bare perfectives as participles and propose an alternative that captures the semantic properties of this structure, in particular their modal interpretation. This analysis involves the interaction of Tense, Aspect, and Mood projections and hence entails that these categories exist in early grammar.
Published Version
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