Abstract
This article is about the unexpected linguistic behavior that young children sometimes display by producing structures that are only marginally present in the adult language in a constrained way, and that adults do not adopt in the same experimental conditions. It is argued here that children's capacity to overextend the use of given syntactic structures thereby resulting in a grammatical creative behavior is the sign of an internal grammatical pressure which manifests itself given appropriate discourse conditions and factors of grammatical complexity and which does not necessarily require a rich input to be put into work. This poverty of the stimulus type situation is illustrated here through the overextended use of a-Topics and reflexive-causative passives by young Italian speaking children when answering eliciting questions concerning the direct object of the clause.
Highlights
Young children sometimes display an unexpected linguistic behavior: they produce structures that are at most only marginally present in the adult language
The experiment aimed at studying the acquisition of two different empirical domains in Italian: Romance-type topicalization/Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) and types of passive
In ClLD the sentence following the left dislocated direct object, which is a discourse topic given in previous discourse, predicates a property of the preposed noun phrase and contains a clitic pronoun referring to it
Summary
Young children sometimes display an unexpected linguistic behavior: they produce structures that are at most only marginally present in the adult language. Children may react differently from adults to the very same experimental conditions, producing structures that are not “simpler” in any intuitive sense of the term This type of children’s linguistic behavior, which is quite widespread in work on development, indicates that some internal pressure, partly due to factors of computational complexity as we will argue, leads children to be grammatically creative. The results to be reviewed here provide new evidence from empirical domains that have not been previously discussed in this connection, that children’s linguistic behavior does not mirror adult production and does not reflect what children hear most In this sense children are capable to express an intriguing grammatical creativity that does not conform to their input (pace Tomasello, 2003, and subsequent related literature). Such creativity in turn is not unconstrained, but, as will be illustrated here, follows the principled organization of the UG-constrained internal grammatical system, indicating clear continuity in the process of linguistic development
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
