Abstract
The wh-marking of questions in child English is as early as the appearance of the wh-questions themselves. The wh-marking of questions in child Dutch (and the other Germanic languages) is delayed until the acquisition of articles and free anaphoric pronouns. An acquisition procedure is proposed that succeeds to set first a typological difference, V2 for Dutch and SVfinO for English. The different setting of the typological parameters determines the wh-development in subsequent acquisition steps. The learnability approach relativizes Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus, but affirms his position that language is ‘perfect’ in the sense of being learnable as a cultural construct without the assumption of innate grammar-specific a prioris.
Highlights
The wh-marking of questions in child English is as early as the appearance of the wh-questions themselves
The second part will sketch an acquisition procedure that derives the phenomenon from the basic typological difference
English and Dutch use the same shifts with the same categories. They move the wh-element to Spec.C and they move the finite verb to the C-position.1 (6) a
Summary
I will first draw the attention to an acquisition problem that has been noticed before. I will argue that typological alternatives (parameters) are just those grammatical properties that are the first to be derived from input. Once set, they determine the further developmental track towards the target grammar. I will argue that each acquisition step, including the ones towards a certain language type, develops a category that is stored in the lexicon and that is characterized by combinatorial properties. One type of acquisition steps serves a Merge construction and its categories, and the other one a Move construction and its categories Both steps derive their categories and combinatorial principles from a simple and local pattern. The discovery of such semantic distinctions may require a flexible awareness of possibilities
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