Missing Subjects in Early Child Language

Abstract

This paper focuses on early grammatical development through the prism of missing subjects in child language. Central work on this topic is reviewed and an attempt is made to draw out the more general implications of missing subjects for parameter-setting models of development (e.g. HyamsAQ: Kindly confirm the references included in Abstract are appropriate as citations are not allowed in Abstract., Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986; Hyams, A reanalysis of null subjects in child language. In: Weissenborn J, Goodluck H, Roeper T (eds) Theoretical issues in language Acquisiton. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., New Jersey, 1991) and maturational models (Borer and Wexler, Nat Linguist Linguist Theory 10:147–189, 1992). Also discussed are more recent analytical directions, including truncation and root null subjects (RizziAQ: Please specify whether it is “2005a” or “2005b” for the citation “Rizzi 2005”., On the grammatical basis of language development: A case study. In Cinque, G, Kayne, R (eds) The oxford handbook of comparative syntax. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 70–109, 2005a; Rizzi, Grammatically-based target-inconsistencies in child language. Proceedings of the inaugural conference of GALANA. UCONN/MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Cambridge, MA, 2005b) and variationalist models of null subjects (Yang, Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002). The review of findings from spontaneous production and imitation studies (e.g. Valian et al., Dev Psychol 32(1):153–164, 1996) leads to a discussion of the converging results of the different methodologies used to explore null subjects in early language. In this context, the results of a recent comprehension study on null subjects in English (Orfitelli, Null subjects in child language: the competing roles of competence and performance. Master’s thesis, UCLA, Department of Linguistics, 2008; OrfitelliAQ: The citation “Orfitelli and Hyams 2007, 2009” is not listed in the References list. Please provide complete details and include in the References list if appropriate and Hyams 2007, 2009) are presented and the implications of those results for competence and performance models (Bloom, Linguist Inq 21:491–504, 1990; Hyams and Wexler, Linguist Inq 24(3):421–459, 1993) are discussed. Finally, some recent (and not so recent) findings are discussed that illustrate children’s pragmatic knowledge in choosing specific subject types (null, pronominal, lexical) (Hughes and Allen, A discourse-pragmatic analysis of subject omission in child English. Proceedings of the 30th annual BUCLD, vol 1. Cascadilla Press, Somerville, pp 293–304, 2006; Hughes and Allen, Child-directed speech and the development of referential choice in child English. Talk presented at the International Association for the Study of Child Language Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2008). These results show early sensitivity to information structure (IS) interacts with grammatical knowledge (and potentially production output), and suggest that pragmatic principles may in fact account for certain results that have thus far been attributed to processing limitations in early language.