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http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2430
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| Title: | What do children have in their heads? Functional heads and parameter setting in child language |
| Authors: | Tesan, Graciela Mariel |
| Advisors: | Thornton, Rosalind |
| Department/Program: | Linguistics |
| Type: | Dissertation |
| Sponsors: | Digital Repository at the University of Maryland
University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) |
| Keywords: | Language, Linguistics (0290)
parameter setting in child language; functional categories in child language; Inflection; Negation; Continuity Hypothesis; Universal Grammar |
| Issue Date: | 19-Apr-2005 |
| Abstract: | The aim of the present study is to revisit the old debate between rationalists and empiricists in relation to language development with new longitudinal data in hand. I show that when it comes to the development of a specific piece of linguistic knowledge, namely the distribution of the third person singular morpheme -s in child English, the generativist approach can satisfactorily account for the quirks observed in the longitudinal data presented herein. First, I argue that children are not conservative learners in the sense of Tomasello (2003), but they set parameters in the sense of Crain (1991). That is to say, child grammars may vary from the adult -significantly-, but the variation is conservatively limited by the hard-wired principles and parameters of Universal Grammar. I conclude that a parameter setting account of the development of functional categories is preferred as it attains explanatory adequacy with a minimal set of assumptions.
I then adopt Lasnik's (1995a) paramet... |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2430 |
| Appears in Collections: | Linguistics Theses and Dissertations
UM Theses and Dissertations
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| umi-umd-2295.pdf | | 1046Kb | Adobe PDF | 436 | View/Open |
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