Optimal Morphosyntax and Its Acquisition


Geraldine Legendre

John Hopkins University, USA

 

Speakers of any language (spoken or signed) draw upon a finite set of memorized words and morphemes to create a potentially infinite set of sentences. Syntactic theory is concerned with what speakers know about how to form sentences, and how speakers come to attain that knowledge. The first lecture will be devoted to general issues, the remaining four will focus on case studies which illustrate both what sort of knowledge is relevant to syntactic theory in the domain of morpho-syntax and its acquisition, and what sort of theory best characterizes crosslinguistic variation.

 

Session # 1: Introduction to OT syntax

 

Readings:

Phillips, C. 2001. Syntax. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Macmillan Reference Ltd.

Legendre, G. 2001. Introduction to OT in Syntax. In Optimality-Theoretic Syntax (G.Legendre, Jane Grimshaw, and Sten Vikner, eds.). MIT Press. 1-27.

 

Session # 2: Auxiliary selection (have vs. be) and the mapping between lexical semantics and syntax

 

Readings:

Sorace, A. 2000. Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs. Language 76:59

Legendre, G. 2007. On the typology of auxiliary selection. Lingua 117:9, 1522-1540.

Legendre, G. In press. A formal typology of person-based auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance. In R. D’Alessandro, I. Robert, and A. Ledgeway (eds.) The Syntax of Italian Dialects. Cambridge University Press.

 

Session # 3: Clitics and their second-position effects at the syntax-PF interface

 

Readings:

Anderson, S. 1996. How to put your clitics in their place or Why the best account of second position phenomena may be a nearly optimal one. The Linguistic Review/ ROA Rutgers.

Legendre, G. 2003. What are clitics? Evidence from Balkan languages. Phonological Studies (Journal of the Phonological Society of Japan). Vol. 6: 89-96.

Legendre, G. 1998. Second-position clitics in a V2 language: Conflict resolution in Macedonian. In J. Austin and A. Lawson, (eds.). Proceedings of the 1997 ESCOL Meeting. CLC Publications, Cornell University. 139-149.

 

Session # 4: Child grammars: Early production of tense, agreement, and aspect

 

Readings:

Clark, E. & B.F. Hecht. 1983. Comprehension, production, and language acquisition. Annual Review of Psychology 34, 325-349.

Smolensky, P. 1996. On the comprehension/production dilemma in child language. Linguistic Inquiry 27:4, 720-731.

Vainikka, A. et al. 1999. PLU stages: An independent measure of early syntactic development. Tech. Report # JHU-CogSci-99-10.

Legendre, G. 2006. Early child grammars: Qualitative and quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic production. Cognitive Science 30, 803-835.

Legendre, G. et al. 2004. Deriving output probabilities in Child Mandarin from a Dual- Optimization grammar. Lingua, Vol. 114/9-10, 1147-1185.

 

Session # 5: Experimental investigations of comprehension of agreement

 

Readings:

Golinkoff, R. et al. 1987. The eyes have it: Lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm. Journal of Child Language 14, 23-45.

Tinkoff, R. et al. 2000. Auxiliary verb learning and 18-month-olds acquisition of morphological relationships. Proceedings of BU conference. Vol. 2. 726-737.

Hühle, B. et al. 2006. The recognition of discontinuous verbal Dependencies By German 19- month- olds: Evidence for lexical and structural influences on children’s early processing capacities. Language Learning and Development 2 (4), 277-300.

Legendre, G. et al. 2007. Acquiring subject-verb agreement in French: Evidence for abstract knowledge from comprehension. Proceedings of BU Conference.