Genitive subjects in child English

Abstract

This chapter provides an analysis of children's so-called ‘genitive subjects’ (like my in My want one ) within the framework of Principles and Parameters Theory . Child clauses with genitive subjects have been argued to have a very different syntactic structure from their adult counterparts, viz. to be nominal rather than clausal, or VPs rather than IPs, or projections of an underspecified (rather than a fully specified) INFL. I argue that the distribution of children's genitive subjects shows conclusively that the structures containing them are clauses rather than nominals. I go on to challenge the traditional analysis of her/my/our/its subjects as genitive pronouns, arguing instead that her subjects are objective, my/its subjects function as strong nominative pronouns for the children who use them, and that our subjects result from a lexical gap in the child's pronoun paradigm. I conclude that there is no evidence that English children go through a genitive subjects stage, and hence no evidence that the grammars developed by two- and three-year old children are radically different from their adult counterparts.