Case Marking and Verb Morphology in Early Syntactic Development






Ito Masuyo





242pp hb  7,400yen




ISBN 4-87378-695-9








@This book considers the phenomenon of non-nominative subjects in the speech of children acquiring English. Ito systematically shows that the attested deviance in pronominal forms arises from the "child-unfriendly" verbal systems peculiar to English, making it possible to assume a feature checking mechanism identical to the adult mechanism. Using this analysis, Ito explains not only the child production of non-nominative subjects, but also the much more restricted distribution of legitimate non-nominative subjects in the adult grammar. She further demonstrates that the default pronoun is structurally licensed in two ways. 
@The ranges of topics discussed includes the acquisition of inflectional marking and Case system in a cross linguistic perspective, the notion of "default," the grammar of clauses@(with emphasis on subjunctives, Mad Magazine sentences and Belfast English), and the nature of morphosyntactic operations in general. 








Contents
1. Introduction
2. Non-Nominative Subjects and Nonfinite Clauses in the Adult Grammar
3. Theoretical Background
4. Previous Studies
5. Data Analysis
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion











      

       

      © 2001. Kyushu University Press. All Rights Reserved.