Abstract
phenomenon, the grammatical marking of discourse reference and clausal argument structure by the category . Just after the acquisition of V2 (at week 125), the use of the variant elements before names/nouns begins to rise. Argument structure gets established, once the predicate containing that structure has been shaped by a grammatical marking . Predication (C0/I0) precedes reference (D0). It takes the period between 2;4–2;9 (week 120–145) for Dutch Sarah’s articles to reach the adult norm. The wh-element is a element too. The acquisition of Move to [Spec,CP] takes place as soon as is identified as a (determiner) in front of NPs. Reinterpreted as a D , the gets access to the clause-initial position. See some examples of preposing in the speech of Sarah before and after the acquisition point at 2;9
Highlights
Linguistic theory is inevitably underdetermined by data
We can informally say that an lexical items (LIs) H ‘labels’ or ‘projects’ in an syntactic objects (SOs) Σ as nothing more than a shorthand for H AgreeingEF with all the LIs contained in Σ, but the word ‘label’/‘project(ion)’ is potentially misleading, since it strongly implies that some ‘feature-percolation’ carries up (“projects”) the features of the head LI to nodes/sets it labels, an unnecessary stipulation that should be avoided unless thoroughly justified by empirical evidence
This article has concluded that syntactic islands do not form a natural class, but that non-islands do, and that, for this reason, there can never be a principled account of islandhood/Subjacency
Summary
Biolinguistic minimalism seeks a deeper explanation of the design, development and evolution of human language by reducing its core domain to the bare minimum including the set-formation operation Merge. In an attempt to open an avenue of research that may lead to an evolutionarily adequate theory of language, this article makes the following proposals: (i) Merge is the elementary combinatorial device that requires no more decomposition; (ii) the precursor to Merge may be found in the uniquely human capacity for hierarchical object manipulation; (iii) the uniqueness of the human lexicon may be captured in terms of Merge. Empirical validations of these proposals should constitute one major topic for the biolinguistic program
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