The Syntax of Nominal Arguments in Early Child English

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the syntax of nominal arguments in the early patterned speech of young children natively acquiring English. The overall hypothesis is that the earliest syntactic structures they produce are purely thematic and lexical. Consequently, the earliest nominals produced by young children are thematic in nature, lacking nonthematic constituents like expletive pronouns and nonthematic prepositions. This assumption accounts for the nonacquisition of referential and possessive determiners. I further maintain that early child nominals are purely lexical projections of nouns into noun phrases and thus lack adult functional projections of determiners into determiner phrases (DPs). Child nominals also lack the adult case and binding properties of DPs and so are caseless, unindexed noun phrases. Taken together, these assumptions provide a principled account of the absence of nominal movement chains in early child English. I examine several possible explanations for the lexical-thematic character of children's initial grammars.