Abstract for Ken Wexler's talk

The development of phases
Ken Wexler (MIT)
May 5, 2005 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

After giving some examples about the progress of the linguistic approach to language acquisition (e.g. cross-linguistic differences in the omissions of object clitics by children, theoretically explained, exemplifying the biolinguistic viewpoint), this talk attempts to unify a great deal of experimental and theoretical research in the acquisition of syntax through consideration of a few developmental principles. The theoretical background is in Wexler (2004). This paper solves a long-standing theoretical puzzle given the A-Chain Delay Hypothesis: why a subject raising out of a VP (or vP) isn't delayed despite the fact that it has an A-chain. The paper proposes that the child has no constraint against A-chains per se, but that rather the child (until around age 5) is subject to the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR): all vP's are phases. This theory accounts for the child's ease in raising a subject, but predicts difficulties with a range of structures. These include verbal passive (in many languages), unaccusative structures and sentence to sentence raising (seem) structures. A wide range of data is presented, including new experimental data on raising and passives, and shown to be consistent with UPR. For example, the experimental data show that short passives of mental verbs are ungrammatical for young children and that raising structures are also ungrammatical for young children. Japanese passive and unaccusative structures are seen to be delayed in children on this account, consistent with much experimental data. Some striking results concern the prediction that wh-raising structures should be good for children although declarative ones are not. The fact that a long-standing puzzle is solved in the most natural way through minimalist considerations is very important and hopeful, both for developmental theory and for linguistic theory and psychological theory more generally. It is suggested that the UPR exists because the child has a "Perfect" grammar in minimalist terms. The explanation is in line with the "biolinguistic" viewpoint - the arguments from linguistic theory and biology that take language to be a property of the developing brain