- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
- The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
- Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Acquisition of Phonological Inventories
- Phonotactics and Syllable Structure in Infant Speech Perception
- Phonological Processes in Children’s Productions: Convergence with and Divergence from Adult Grammars
- Prosodic Phenomena: Stress, Tone, and Intonation
- Compound Word Formation
- Morpho-phonological Acquisition
- Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy: From Major Prosodic Units to Isolated Word Forms
- Argument Structure
- Voice Alternations (Active, Passive, Middle)
- On the Acquisition of Prepositions and Particles
- A-Movement in Language Development
- The Acquisition of Complements
- Acquisition of Questions
- Root Infinitives in Child Language and the Structure of the Clause
- Mood Alternations
- Null Subjects
- Case and Agreement
- Acquiring Possessives
- Acquisition of Comparatives and Degree Constructions
- Quantification in Child Language
- The Acquisition of Binding and Coreference
- Logical Connectives
- The Expression of Genericity in Child Language
- Lexical and Grammatical Aspect
- Scalar Implicature
- Computational Theories of Learning and Developmental Psycholinguistics
- Statistical Learning, Inductive Bias, and Bayesian Inference in Language Acquisition
- Computational Approaches to Parameter Setting in Generative Linguistics
- Learning with Violable Constraints
- Language Development in Children with Developmental Disorders
- The Genetics of Spoken Language
- Phonological Disorders: Theoretical and Experimental Findings
- References
- Index
- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter provides an overview of the literature on children’s acquisition of constructions involving A(rgument)-movement: passive, unaccusative verbs, raising-to-subject, and raising-to-object. Considering A-movement within a derivational theoretical framework (GB/Minimalism), we provide some historical and theoretical context for treating these constructions under the same operation. In all cases, the surface position of an NP is incongruous with its syntactic configuration for receiving its thematic role. For each construction we discuss empirical evidence concerning children’s knowledge of the construction (including, where available, cross-linguistic data), and the major theoretical debates that have arisen around them, notably Maturation. We suggest that variability in experimental outcomes, both within and across constructions, can be linked to methodological choices and not likely to lack of linguistic knowledge.
Keywords: A-movement, control, maturation, passive, raising-to-object, raising-to-subject, unaccusatives
Misha Becker is Associate Professor of Linguistics at UNC Chapel Hill. Her recent research has focused on how children learn to distinguish syntactic constructions with argument displacement (e.g. raising and tough-movement) from similar constructions without displacement (control), and the role that animacy plays in this process. She has conducted psycholinguistic studies with both children and adults using a variety of methodologies, including sentence judgment, novel verb learning, and reaction time.
Susannah Kirby has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has held positions at UNC-CH, the University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University. Her research in Linguistics focused primarily on the acquisition of raising and control verbs and the syntactic distinctions between those verbs in adult English, and used both nativist/generativist and emergentist/constructionist models. She is currently completing a degree in Computer Science.
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- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
- The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
- Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Acquisition of Phonological Inventories
- Phonotactics and Syllable Structure in Infant Speech Perception
- Phonological Processes in Children’s Productions: Convergence with and Divergence from Adult Grammars
- Prosodic Phenomena: Stress, Tone, and Intonation
- Compound Word Formation
- Morpho-phonological Acquisition
- Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy: From Major Prosodic Units to Isolated Word Forms
- Argument Structure
- Voice Alternations (Active, Passive, Middle)
- On the Acquisition of Prepositions and Particles
- A-Movement in Language Development
- The Acquisition of Complements
- Acquisition of Questions
- Root Infinitives in Child Language and the Structure of the Clause
- Mood Alternations
- Null Subjects
- Case and Agreement
- Acquiring Possessives
- Acquisition of Comparatives and Degree Constructions
- Quantification in Child Language
- The Acquisition of Binding and Coreference
- Logical Connectives
- The Expression of Genericity in Child Language
- Lexical and Grammatical Aspect
- Scalar Implicature
- Computational Theories of Learning and Developmental Psycholinguistics
- Statistical Learning, Inductive Bias, and Bayesian Inference in Language Acquisition
- Computational Approaches to Parameter Setting in Generative Linguistics
- Learning with Violable Constraints
- Language Development in Children with Developmental Disorders
- The Genetics of Spoken Language
- Phonological Disorders: Theoretical and Experimental Findings
- References
- Index
- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
