Early Articles in English Child Language: Impostors or Overt Instantiations of a Nominal Functional Category?

Abstract

ABSTRACTChildren’s development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children’s early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss’s (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a study of German child language, this article examines the data of six English-speaking children available through CHILDES, focusing on MLUs up to 2.5, to ascertain the status of articles in early English child language. Although Eisenbeiss argued that the determiners in early German child language are impostors, the following results of our study indicate that in English-speaking children’s early use, the articles are in fact overt instantiations of a nominal functional category: (i) there is no stage in which overt articles do not occur, and (ii) early articles do not appear in a restricted set of syntactic contexts.