Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Growing trees: The acquisition of the left periphery

Naama Friedmann,     Adriana Belletti    &   Luigi Rizzi

Tel Aviv University    University of Siena    Collège de France

(presented by A.Belletti and L.Rizzi)

The heart of our account is that stages of acquisition follow the geometry of the syntactic tree, along the lines of the cartographic analysis of the left periphery of the clause proposed in Rizzi (1997), Rizzi and Bocci (2017). The lower parts of the tree are acquired first, and higher parts are acquired later. Thus, early stages of acquisition correspond to small portions of the adult syntactic tree, which keeps growing with the growth of the child. 

The talk will illustrate dimensions in which cartographic research and the study of development interact in fruitful ways. On the one hand, syntactic cartography provides detailed maps of the fundamental zones of the syntactic tree which may bring to light patterns underlying apparently disparate developmental effects. On the other hand, developmental data may provide evidence on the organization of complex structural maps.  We will illustrate this fruitful dialogue by conducting a cartography-based analysis of the main results on the acquisition of Hebrew reported in Reznick and Friedmann (2017), from a corpus study of spontaneous production and a repetition task.

The growth of the tree from lower to higher layers is consistent with standard assumptions on the bottom-up nature of syntactic computations, going from the contentive part of the clause, the lexical layer, to the functional ones. We propose three stages of acquisition connected to the development of functional layers, and a fourth stage related to intervention. In the first stage, the IP is acquired, including the lexical and inflectional layers. This allows for the appearance of declarative clausal structures, including both SV and VS orders with unaccusative verbs, alongside SV sentences with unergative/transitive verbs. At this stage there is no manifestation of left peripheral positions. The second stage involves the acquisition of the lower part of the left periphery, up to the landing site of wh-movement, which allows for the acquisition of subject and object Wh questions, some adjunct questions, yes/no questions, and sentence-initial adverbs. In the third stage the rich structure of the left periphery is completely acquired, including the higher CP field. This is the stage in which sentential embedding (of declarative and interrogative clauses), subject and object relative clauses, why questions, and topicalization appear. A final stage, which occurs on the already-grown tree, is the acquisition of intervention configurations, allowing for the mastery of structures involving movement of a lexically restricted object across an intervening lexically restricted subject