Abstract
As Halle & Marantz (2008: 71) acknowledge, “we have no real idea about how a child assigns features to Vocabulary Items” in Distributed Morphology (DM). Stated generally, how do children acquire language-specific (sometimes variable) mappings between morpho-syntactic features and their morpho-phonological exponents? Following Emonds (1986) in a DM framework, this article advances a testable ‘morphological transparency’ constraint on the acquisition of Vocabulary, and presents supporting results from a pilot observational child-language study in Danish. This constraint explains a significant difference in the mechanisms of Germanic case morphology. By hypothesis, ‘vestigial’ case forms of English and Danish pronouns are contextual allomorphs, with Vocabulary that do not contain any morpho-syntactic case features. Vestigial-case mechanisms constitute a comprehensive analysis of intra-individually variable case-form mismatches in coordinate Determiner Phrases, predicate nominals, and other syntactic structures. Thus, a principle of language acquisition ultimately explains the distribution of case forms both within and across language varieties.
Highlights
As is well known, a high degree of inter-individual variation can be observed in the morphosyntax of case (e.g., Blake 1994, Malchukov! " Spencer 2009)
This imperative strengthens if we adopt any version of more radical proposals, whereby case morphology is divorced from abstract licensing of nominal phrases in the syntax, and the features or properties realized as case are determined or valued solely in a post-syntactic morphological interface component
The theory presented so far is compatible with the standard view that semantically uninterpretable abstract Case features are checked/ valued in the narrow syntax, or with emerging proposals that case features are only assigned/realized in the post-syntactic morphological component (McFadden 2004, Sigur!sson 2009)
Summary
A high degree of inter-individual (i.e. cross-linguistic) variation can be observed in the morphosyntax of case (e.g., Blake 1994, Malchukov! " Spencer 2009). Insofar as such morphological mechanisms are explicitly articulated, as they are in DM, it becomes possible, and necessary, to formulate and test hypotheses about how they are learned by children during the process of linguistic development This imperative strengthens if we adopt any version of more radical proposals, whereby case morphology is divorced from abstract licensing of nominal phrases in the syntax, and the features or properties realized as case are determined or valued solely in a post-syntactic morphological interface component (e.g., Marantz 2000, McFadden 2004, 2007, Sigur!sson 2006, 2009; but cf Legate 2008 for arguments against such approaches). A principle of language acquisition provides the ultimate explanation for the distribution of case forms both within and across languages
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