Grammatical Computation in the Optional Infinitive Stage

Abstract

AbstractThis paper gives a survey of some of the major properties of and approaches to the Optional Infinitive stage of linguistic development. After a brief account of its first discovery, a description is given of some of its major properties, including rates of OI production and how they change over time and vary cross-linguistically. “Surfacy” accounts of the stage are considered, such as the possibility that the use of the root infinitival where it doesn’t belong is a kind of phonological simplification. Some attention is also devoted to the possibility that the OI stage arises from the omission of an auxiliary. Evidence argues against these approaches. Instead, radical omission models, in which the features of Tense (and possibly other inflectional elements) are totally missing from the phrase-marker for an OI, are argued to hold most promise. Considerations of relations of subject case and OI’s lead to the formulation of the ATOM model to describe the stage. Empirical evidence is provided in support of the Null Subject/OI correlation, including a detailed discussion of recent papers on Italian and Dutch. Both papers investigate large numbers of children. Two major contenders for the best approach to the OI stage are described: the Truncation model and the Unique Checking Constraint (UCC) model. The empirical evidence favors the UCC. If the UCC is the best theory, how does it go away so that children become linguistic adults? It is argued that only a biologically based maturation theory can account for the data, and some recent genetic results bolster this argument. The paper discusses empiricist approaches to the problem of OI, devoting most attention to a recent attempt to explain the existence of the OI stage as arising from difficulties in a child’s learning that his/her language has Tense. It is argued that the approach fails to predict the central phenomena of the OI stage and that the traditional representational/growth models fare best. To demonstrate the wide empirical applicability of the proposed model of early syntactic development, extensions to properties of the syntactic object system are suggested, such as clitic omission cross-linguistically and short-form negation errors in Korean as well as the question of to and be omission in this stage.KeywordsWord OrderEmbed ClauseSmall ClauseTense ParameterMain VerbThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.