Structure of Language
Fragments of child grammar
Rosalind Thornton and Britta Jensen
This study investigates the structure of young children's answers to questions. As adults, when we answer questions, we often reply with 'fragment' answers. For example, if someone asks you "What did you eat for morning tea?" the simple answer "A muffin", sounds more natural than "I ate a muffin for morning tea" because much of the information in the full sentence answer is already assumed. However, according to certain linguistic theories, the fragment answer "A muffin" is derived from the full sentence answer. The idea is that the speaker generates the full sentence answer, but only the new information "A muffin" is actually pronounced. This presents the intriguing possibility that children have the linguistic knowledge that allows them to generate full sentence structures from the earliest stages, and that what they have to learn is what 'pieces' of the preceding question make a good fragment answer.
Sentence Complementation of the verb 'want'
Rosalind Thornton
This project examines children's early productions of sentences like "I want to swing" and ones like "I want you to swing". The literature notes that children often drop the infinitival marker "to". Close examination of child data shows the pattern is more complicated. The first sentence type to appear are ones like "I want to swing", in which the subject of the higher clause is also the subject of the infinitival clause. Children initially produce these sentences with and without "to". In sentences like "I want you to swing", the subject of the higher clause ("I") is different from the subject of the lower clause ("you"). By the time children attempt this second kind of sentence, the infinitival marker is mostly present in sentences like "I want to swing". Nevertheless, children leave out the infinitival marker, consistently producing utterances like "I want you swing". Since children clearly can produce the infinitival marker at this point, the data suggest another explanation. A proposal I am exploring is that children begin with the hypothesis that 'want' takes a finite clause in the subjunctive mood, as is appropriate for other language groups (e.g. Balkan languages). This is supported by utterances like "I want he play dalmatians" in which the subject of the lower clause takes nominative case, and the verb does not display 3rd person morphology. These utterances contrast with utterances for the verb 'think', such as "I think it feels comfortable", where the 3rd person marker is present. The project is exploring why children begin with the non adult hypothesis and what brings about change in their grammar.