The Process of Adjunction, Composition, and Acquisition: Why Internal Merge and Simplify are robust biolinguistic Operations

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• Prof Tom Roeper (UMass)
• Friday 26 October 2012, 16:00-18:00
• Lecture Block room 4, Sidgwick Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Teresa Parodi.

Why do young children so easily generate forms like:

"there no squirrels, there no more these"        (Eve  1/11yr)

And why do children younger than 5yrs allow relative clauses on sentences like these:

"it cost a dollar and ten cents which you already knew"

Spontaneous early acquisition evidence supports Chomsky (2012)’s claim that Internal Merge (move) is conceptually simpler than External Merge and therefore should occur first, contrary to the general view that Move is more complex. Anaphoric-there, which involves binding, is delayed. Unlike Nishigauchi and Roeper (1987) and Sigusdottir (2011) who have sought to explain acquisition in terms of reference or “3rd factors”, this modernized view of parameters supports Hyams (1986) on the role of there-insertion and Holmberg (2010) on parametric clusters.

We will argue for two opposite phenomena in acquisition: Internal Merge and Adjunction (Pair-Merge) with Simplify, evidence for two-steps in the acquisition of all forms of External Merge. The argument will be that identifying the Label of a new element in acquisition requires first Linearization, then projection of a shared feature, and finally a Probe-Goal subcategorization operation that establishes SET -Merge. As with light verbs, the acquisition process involves projection from the Complement to the verb, which UG then re-analyzes as a verb-complement connection.

The translation of “technical solutions” into “leading ideas” is critical in the building of a biologically “robust” theory. Acquisition steps which occur chronologically are ideal evidence for this kind of theory-building.

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