Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of English
Introduction to Linguistics
Fall 2003
Answers to Cook and Newson, `Chapter 8a`.
1.What are the two major differing views in modern first language acquisition theory?
When looking at First Language Acquisition (FLA) the main issue revolves around the status of functional categories. Some researchers, Andrew Radford, particular, have posited that children up to a certain age do not have access to any functional categories at all. Other people, Pinker among them, believe that the no functional categories view, while attractive due to its simplicity, is too simple. They believe that children from the very first, do have access to functional categories.
2. What is the support for the no functional categories view?
One of the main supports for the no functional categories view is that children at a certain age do not show Tense or Agreement on their verbs. This has been shown to occur cross-linguistically. Look at the German and English examples below.
1. Daddy sleep. (Daddy is sleeping.)
2. Help jelly? (Can you help me to some jelly?)
3. Ich Schaufel haben. (Ich habe eine Schaufel)
We can see from the examples that it does indeed seem that the English and German children who spoke these utterances do lack functional categories. In 1 the verb sleep is left in the VP. There is no evidence of it moving forward to TP or AGRP positions to receive its tense of agreement marking. The same can be said for the German utterance in 3. The verb is left in VP position and there in no movement of the verb into the V2 position, which we saw earlier was where German verbs are marked for Tense and Agreement. In example 2, we seen that the child has no access to CP because there is no use of Wh-words or helping verbs when trying to form questions. It is also interesting to note that the nouns here are in NPs and not DPs. Since DPs are functional categories and not lexical ones, this is to be expected and it lends further support to the no functional categories view.
3.What are the problems with the no functional categories view?
The main problem with this view, as argued so eloquently by Cook and Newson, is that it relies almost entirely on negative observations. Radford in coming to his conclusions did not look at what children could do, rather he chose to look at and base his ideas on what the children could NOT do. From a theoretical perspective, this is a big problem. Think about it this way. If you want to describe what a room looks like, how are you going to do it? It makes sense to try to describe what is in the room rather than what is not in the room. The list of what is not in the room is infinitely larger and more a complex than the list of what is in the room. Such a negative list is also not very helpful in getting us to understand what is actually there. For this very basic reason many people think that Radford`s reasoning in coming up with the no functional categories view is flawed. It is a simple question of point of view which has a very strong affect on how research is conducted and the validity thereof.
4.What is the main crux of the functional categories view of Wexler and others?
The main idea of Wexler and others is children do have access to functional categories, but not to all categories or at the same levels. What Wexler really does is prove that children do have some access to such categories. He uses data from negation in French and other cross-linguistic situations.
4. Pas la pupee dormir.
no the doll sleep (inf.)
5. No the sun shining.
6. Elle a pas la bouche.
she has not art. mouth
In the first two examples above we see that children at least have to have the functional category NegP in order to create both utterances. Interesting is the difference between the French utterances in 4 and 6. In 4, the negative must come in the beginning and the NP does not get moved out of the verb. In 6, the NP is fronted and the verb is marked for Tense and Agreement (I). How does this happen? The main difference between 4 and 6, Wexler argues is that the verb in 4 is non-finite, while in 6 it is finite. He, thus concludes that only finite verbs are able to move into I. Since this movement can occur sometimes, then the functional category of I must, indeed, be there. Let`s look at a couple more examples.
7. Ich der Frosch hab`n.
I the frog have (inf.)
8. Mein Hubsache had Tiere din.
My Helicopter has animals in it
In the German examples of 7 and 8, we see the same thing happening. Finite verbs are able to move to V2 position in German while non-finite verbs cannot. We know that for verbs to move to V2 position in German there must be functional categories to forma landing site. From such clear evidence, Wexler concludes that children do, in fact, have functional categories, but they are used with different restrictions as the in the fully developed language of adults.
5. What is main idea behind the morphological uniformity hypothesis?
The Morphological Uniformity Hypothesis (MUH) was devised as a way of trying to explain cross-linguistically why languages as different as Italian and Chinese pro-drop while languages that are very similar like French and Italian are different in relation to pro-drop. What it basically says it that we should look at morphological data to try to figure out what is going on. Languages that are completely uniform in their inflectional morphology on verbs (and this uniformity could come as a result of a total lack of verbal inflection as in the case of Chinese and Korean) pro-drop languages. Languages that are not uniform in the verbal inflections are non-pro-drop. It seems like a very simple idea as demonstrated by the paradigms below.
Person Spanish Welsh Hopi English German Danish
1sing. canto canaf kuyna sing singe synger
2sing. cantas ceni kuyna sing singst synger
3sing. canta can kuyna sings singt synger
1pl. cantamos canwn kuyna sing singen synger
2pl. cantais cenwch kuyna sing singt synger
3pl. canta canat kuyna sing singen synger
In the examples from Spanish and Welsh we see that there are different inflectional endings for all of the verbs. The fact that there is always a different ending shows uniformity in the pattern. Hopi is exactly the opposite. In Hopi, as in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, there are no inflectional endings to show agreement with the subject. This is also shows uniformity. In the English and German data, however, we see that there is no uniformity in that there are sometimes, but not always, different inflectional endings.
The problem here is with the Danish data. In Danish there is a uniform paradigm, which would lead us to believe according to the MUH that Danish is a Pro-DROP language, but it is not as the following sentences show.
9. Det er det. (Lit. It is it)
10. Det regner (it is raining)
11. Regner det? (Is it raining)
12. *Regner? (Is it raining)
The fact that Danish seems to require empenthetic subjects and it does this through the use of pleonastic pronouns like det shows that Danish is clearly a non-pro-drop language.
6.What are the problems with the morphological uniformity hypothesis?
There has been a lot of criticism aimed at the MUH. The main problem is that there is no reason for picking 3 persons and the numbers of singular and plural as being the correct number of categories. This is a very Euro-centric concept since many Indo-European languages. Now, I am just bringing this up because it underscores a very important point and one that affects us directly here in Korea.
The field of linguistics is traditionally an extremely Eurocentric endeavor. Linguistics was founded on the study of Indo-European languages. This means a lot of the ideas in linguistics are filtered through Indo-European. As Koreans this is something that you need to bear in mind, particularly as Korean is a non-Indo-European language (maybe).
7. Why are linguists so concerned with how and why pro-drop occurs?
Linguists are extremely concerned with the phenomenon of pro-drop. The basic idea is that pro drop is a fairly simple phenomenon and, therefore, it has been chosen as a kind of forefront and linguistic study for providing proof for UG. One thing that we have to remember is that UG is a theory. Nobody has ever proven that UG actually exists. It is more matter of faith than anything else. It is therefore extremely important for linguists try to find some way of proving that UG has some sort of psychological reality. This is especially true since its standard linguistic theory the role of UG has been decreasing substantially over the years and the role of lexis has been steadily rising. Lexis is, of course, beyond the realm of UG. In fact the only elements of UG did we really need to be concerned about are parameter settings. As one of the most basic parameter settings pro drop is therefore a highly contested area.
The basic idea is this, if linguists can prove that pro drop has some sort of psychological reality they can then begin to find proof that UG actually does exist. Now, in order to prove that pro drop sums of psychological reality they have to find something of reasoning for pro drop which goes beyond simple copying from the environment. That's what the Morphological Uniformity Hypothesis is all about. It has been proposed to try to find a reason for program so that pro drop can be linked to sums of psychological reality.