Questions: Movement or Constructions?

Ben Ambridge (University of Liverpool)
November 3, 2009 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

One area for which generativist and constructivist accounts of language acquisition make different predictions is the acquisition of questions. For generativist accounts, questions represent a paradigmatic case of syntactic movement. For constructivist accounts, questions are not formed by movement. Rather, children's earliest questions are formed using a set of partially-abstract constructions (e.g., What does he PROCESS?; Do you PROCESS?). This talk will review three experimental elicited-production studies designed to compare the predictions of the two accounts. Taken together, these studies investigate acquisition of a wide range of question types: wh- and yes/no questions (with a range of different wh-words and auxiliaries), positive and negative questions (e.g., why does.../why doesn’t...) and complex questions (e.g., is the boy who is washing the elephant tired?) that bear on Chomsky's (1980) famous claim of innate knowledge of structure dependence.