Week 3. More optional infinitives, this time with meaning

1
GRS LX 865Topics in Linguistics

• Week 3. More optional infinitives, this time with
  meaning

2
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Child English bare stems as OIs?
• In the present, only morphology is 3sg -s.
• Bare stem isnt unambiguously an infinitive form.
• No word order correlate to finiteness.
• OIs are clearer in better inflected languages.
  Does English do this too? Or is it different?
• Hypotheses
• Kids dont get inflection yet go and goes are
  basically homonyms.
• These are OIs, the -s is correlated with
  something systematic about the child syntax.

3
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Exploring a consequence of having T in the
  structure do support.
• Rationale
• Main verbs do not move in English.
• Without a modal or auxiliary, T is stranded The
  verb -ed not move.
• Do is inserted to save T.
• Predicts No T, no do insertion.

4
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Empirically, we expect
• She go
• She goes
• She not go (no T no do)
• She doesnt go (adult, T and do)
• but never
• She not goes (evidence of T, yet no do).
• Note All basically options if kids dont get
  inflection.

5
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Looked at 10 kids from 16 to 41
• Adam, Eve, Sara (Brown), Nina (Suppes), Abe
  (Kuczaj), Naomi (Sachs), Shem (Clark), April
  (Higginson), Nathaniel (Snow).
• Counted sentences
• with no or not before the verb
• without a modal/auxiliary
• with unambiguous 3sg subjects
• with either -s or -ed as inflected.

6
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Affirmative
• 43 inflected
• Negative
• lt 10 inflected
• It not works Mom
• no N. has a microphone
• no goes in there
• but the horse not stand ups
• no goes here!

aff neg
-inflec 782 47
inflec 594 5
7
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Small numbers, but in the right direction.
• Generalization Considering cases with no
  auxiliary, kids inflect about half the time
  normally, but almost never (up to performance
  errors) inflect in the negative.
• If do is an indicator of T in the negative, we
  might expect to see that do appears in negatives
  about as often as inflection appears in
  affirmatives.
• Also, basically true 37 vs. 34 in the pre-26
  group, 73 vs. 61 in the post-26 group.

8
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Also, made an attempt to ascertain how the form
  correlated with the intended meaning in terms of
  tense. (Note a nontrivial margin of error)
• Inflected verbs overwhelmingly in the right
  context.

present past future
bare stem 771 128 39
-s 418 14 5
-ed 10 168 0
9
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Last, an elicitation experiment contrasting
  affirmative, never (no T dependence for adults),
  and not.
• Does the cow always go in the barn, or does she
  never go?
• Does the cow go in the barn or does she not go in
  the barn?
• Do you think he always goes or do you think he
  never goes?
• Do you think that he goes, or dont you think
  that he goes?

10
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Designed to test a processing load type
  hypothesis the extra load of not might be
  alleviated by leaving off the -s.
• If thats the case, wed expect never and not to
  behave the same wayin fact, never might be
  harder, just because its longer (and trigger
  more -s drops).

11
Harris Wexler (1996)

• Affirmatives inflected often, not inflected
  rarely, never sort of inbetween.
• Looking at the results in terms of whether the
  question was inflected
• Kids overall tended to use inflection when there
  was inflection in the question.
• When the stimulus contained an -s
• affirmative 15 vs. 7 (68)
• never 14 vs. 16 (48)
• not 4 vs. 12 (25) quite a bit lower.

12
Hoekstra Hyams (1998)

• Root infinitives are a crosslinguistically
  attested phenomenon.
• Fn. Children use both dont and doesnt. HH
  suggest dont might be a case where do is
  supporting nt (rather than tense). When inverted
  (i.e. in utterances like Doesnt he want to go?),
  the inflection is always correct according to
  them.

13
Hoekstra Hyams (1998)

• Quick notes contra Radford and the
  no-functional-projections approach
• Sure, English uses bare stems. But what about the
  other languages that use actually marked
  infinitives? That infinitival marker is assumed
  to live in a functional projection.
• Kids use both finite and nonfinite utterances at
  the same developmental point, so a maturational
  account seems not to work.

14
Interpretation and functional categories

• A basic premise of Hoekstra Hyams (1998) is
  that tense is a means of connecting between the
  structural meaning and the discourse. Tense
  anchors a sentence in the discourse.
• They propose that the relation between discourse
  (CP) and T must be signaled (to ground an
  utterance), and is signaled by different things
  in different languages.
• Dutch number morphology ? only these have RIs?
• Japanese tense morphology
• Italian, Spanish, Catalan person morphology

15
Underspecification of number?

• HH propose in light of this that whats wrong
  with kids has to do with number specifically. OI
  languages are those where number is crucial in
  the finite inflection.
• HH picked up on something about when these RIs
  seem to be used. It seemed that there are certain
  verbs that showed up in the nonfinite form, but
  others that didnt.

16
Eventivity Constraint

• In particular, it seems that RIs show up only
  with verbs referring to events not with verbs
  referring to states, not with auxiliary verbs.
  Finite verbs seem to have no such restriction.
  Original research on Dutch on French, also
  Russian.
• Eventivity ConstraintRIs are restricted to
  event-denoting predicates.

17
Modal Reference Effect

• The other thing is that RIs often have a modal
  meaning (can, will, must, want to..) (pretty
  dramatic in Dutch, German, French).
• Modal Reference EffectWith overwhelming
  frequency, RIs have modal interpretations.

18
English weird

• English doesnt seem to conform to the pattern.
  Ud Deen (1997) found
• plenty of bare stative verbs (EC)
• Man have it
• Ann need Mommy napkin
• Papa want apple
• plenty of non-modal bare verbs (MRE)
• Dutch 86 of RIs have modal meaning. Cf. 3of
  finite forms.
• English 13 of bare forms have modal meaning Cf,
  12 of finite forms..

19
Null Modal Hypothesis

• A possible explanation for this is that RIs are
  simply utterances with an unpronounced modal.
  This would for the most part make sense.
• Mommy (should) not go.
• Eve (will) sit on (the) floor.
• Explains why the verb is non-finite, explains why
  it behaves nonfinite (null modal is doing all the
  tensed verb stuff, like V2, etc.). A quite
  elegant explanation.

20
Problems with NMH (rats!)

• RIs and finite utterances have different
  properties, but the NMH obliterates any
  distinction we can use to capture that (both are
  finite under NMH).
• E.g., topicalization in German, Dutch, Swedish
  (all V2), which never occurs with RIs, but often
  occurs with finite forms.
• E.g., wh-questions in German, Dutch, Swedish,
  French, which never occur with RIs, but often
  occur otherwise.

21
HHs hypothesis

• Number is an inflectional property both of the
  nominal and the verbal system.
• though it arises in the nominal system.
• Missing determiners and RIs are both a symptom of
  underspecified Number.
• Spec-head agreementcommunicates
  number(under)specificationto the verb.

22
HH (1998) BUCLD

• Looked at Niek (CHILDES, Dutch).
• They found that with finite DPs, the verb was
  pretty much always finite too.
• They found that with nonfinite DPs, the verb
  was somewhat more likely to be nonfinite than
  with a finite DP, but still overwhelmingly
  favored finite DPs.
• Only null subjects didnt overwhelmingly favor
  finite V. (NS 45 nonfinite).

23
HH (1998) BUCLD

• All things being equal, we might have expected a
  11 correlation between finite DP subjects and
  finite V, if it were a matter of Spec-head
  agreement. We dont have that. We have a
  one-directional relation.
• If DP is finite, V is finite.
• If V is nonfinite, DP is nonfinite.

24
HH (1998) BUCLD

• In a sense, one setting cares about its partner
  in the Spec-Head relationship, and the other
  setting doesnt.
• Finite V seems not to care whether the subject is
  finite or not.
• Nonfinite V does seem to care, and requires a
  nonfinite subject.
• More specifically, there is a default, and the
  default does not need to be licensed (whereas
  non-defaults do).

25
HH (1998) BUCLD

• In Dutch, 3sg is default.
• 1sg verb licensed only by a 1sg subject.
• 3sg verb licensed by any old subject.
• In English, 3sg is not the default. Its the one
  marked form.
• 3sg verb licensed only by a 3sg subject.
• bare verb licensed by any old subject.

26
Thus

• The doggie bark.
• He bark
• Doggie sit here.
• Doggie barks.
• Het hondje hier zitten.
• He hier zitten.
• Hondje hier zitten.
• Hondje zit hier.

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cf. Schütze Wexler

• the English bare form is ambiguous between an
  infinitive and a finite form (HH98101)
• Although stated in different terminology, and
  addressing a slightly different arena of facts,
  the basic concept is the same as that in SW96.
• TA -gt finite (-s)
• T-A, -TA, -T-A -gt nonfinite (stem)
• but A ones will have A properties (e.g. NOM),
  just stem form. Same for T.

28
English bare form ? infinitive

• SW and HH agree that the English bare form
  isnt strictly speaking (necessarily) the true
  infinitive.

29
HH and interpretation

• Claim RIs are interpreted as -realized, the
  contribution of the infinitival morpheme itself.
• Languages with an infinitival morpheme and actual
  RIs should show 100 modal (-realized)
  interpretation with RIs.
• English, with a Ø infinitival morpheme, obscures
  the correlation in practice, we expect only some
  (the actually infinitive) bare forms to be modal.

30
epistemic vs. deontic

• John must leave.
• Deontic About the way the world isnt now but
  needs to be.
• John must know French.
• Epistemic About the way the world is (now).
• Seems to be a correlation between eventivity
  and modality type, in the adult language.

31
Modality and kids

• In other circles of research, people have
  proposed that kids basically dont have
  epistemic uses of modality (John must be a
  genius) before about 3 years oldfor whatever
  reason.
• If thats true, theres only deontic modality
  (John must go to class).
• If deontic modality only goes with eventive
  predicates, were done. Kids RIs are modal,
  necessarily deontic, hence necessarily with
  eventive verbs.

32
English must be different

• English bare forms are not (necessarily)
  infinitives, not necessarily modal, hence not
  necessarily deontic, eventive.
• Hence, the EC and MRE seem not to hold of
  English, but for reasons we can now understand.

33
English be

• Becker (2000) BUCLD studied the interpretive
  patterns with the copula be in English (and when
  it is dropped).
• Looked at Nina, Peter, and Naomi, 20 to 23-5.
• existential There is a man in the garden. Always
  there.
• nominal predicative John is a student. Just
  about always there.
• adjectival predicative John is tall, John is
  sick. There about half the time.
• locative predicative The book is on the table.
  Rarely there.

34
Becker (2000)

• Becker observes that this hints at a distinction
  between inherent and accidental properties of
  things. (individual-level vs. stage-level).
• John is a boy. John is tall.
• My pen is on the floor. John is sick.
• Dividing adjectival predicates this way (tall vs.
  sick), we get about 80 be with individual-level
  and about 40 be with stage-level. Cf. around 20
  with locatives.
• Both 20 and 40 are considered low.

35
Becker (2000)

• Cf. the stative/eventive distinction?
• Statives are kind of timeless, like
  individual-level predicates.
• Eventives are kind of time-specified, like
  stage-level predicates.
• They are differentJohn is sick is a stage-level
  stativebut they might respond to similar
  distinction.
• Existentials (theres a camel) unexpectedly
  always show up with be. Becker proposes that part
  of the way expletives like there work requires be
  to be there. (ed MBs exx. look like inverted
  locatives to me)

36
Wexler (2000)

• In terms of ATOM, Wexler suggests that be is
  special in that if either TP or AgrSP is missing,
  be is not spelled out at all. Be is the most
  inflected verb form in English, the most
  sensitive to both T and Agr.
• am, are, is, was, were
• Following a widely known analysis of Molly
  Diesings, he suggests that subjects of
  individual-level predicates start higher (outside
  VP, say in SpecTP). Thus, no need to omit either
  TP or AgrP for individual-level predicates, hence
  we should always find be.

37
Wexler (2000)

• With respect to eventivity, Wexler raises doubts
  about whether its really about eventivity vs.
  stativity or whether we again have a
  stage-level vs. individual-level question.
• For example, see/hear seem to actually be stative
  (John is seeing/hearing the baseball game) but
  stage-level, while love is stative and
  individual-level. The first kind occur in the RI,
  the second kind dont. Perhaps its really again
  stage-vs.-individual-level, where subjects start
  higher with individual-level predicates.

38
Wexler (2000)

• Finite null subjects. Hamann discussed this
  question If null subjects are licensed by RIs,
  what should we say about the null subjects with
  finite verbs? W had previously said topic drop,
  but H showed that Danish kids use of null
  subjects with finite verbs correlated highly with
  the use of RIs in general.

39
Wexler (2000)

• Are there really lots of null subjects with
  finite verbs? Perhaps notperhaps some of the
  finite verbs are really the RIs.
• Idea There is no agreement marking per se
  (agreement is always null), but the form of the
  tense node differs depending on whether agreement
  is there.
• If there are agreement features around, spell out
  er (present), regardless of the value or
  presence of tense features.
• Past, de, otherwise e (default, infinitive)
• Point køb-er looks like present tense finite,
  but it could be missing T (hence legitimately
  license NS).

40
Wexler (2000) vs. Danish

• That is,
• Agr, Tns køb-er (present) (adult)
• -Agr, Tns køb-e (infinitive) no NS allowed
• -Agr, -Tns køb-e (infinitive) NS allowed
• Agr, -Tns køb-er (present) NS allowed.
• Predicts No NSs with past tense verbs like
  køb-de (since unambiguously Tns, which is the
  thing that prevents NS). True?

41
Hamann (2002) vs. Wexler

• Well, not really vanishingly small
• Jens (20-34 mos.s) 14/42 (33) NS past.
• Anne (18-30 mos.) 13/33 (39) NS past.
• Maybe weve got 3 functional projections?
• TP is there. If either of the others are missing,
  no NS, but if both are missing NS is ok? That
  would give us a third.

42
A pause to regroup

• English bare form is unmarked, only -s is
  unambiguously TA.
• Do is a reflex of T (and/or A), and as
  expected, almost never in negative sentences was
  there a post-negation inflected verb (she doesnt
  go vs. she not goes).
• The actual infinitive morpheme in English is Ø,
  so we cant differentiate bare forms between
  infinitives and other bare forms.
• The infinitive morpheme seems to carry modal
  meaningin languages where you can see it you can
  tell. Effectively RI only with eventives.

43
A pause to regroup

• HH propose that the languages which show OIs are
  those which rely (only) on number in their
  inflectional system. Those that dont (Japanese
  tense only, Italian person) seem to be
  immune. Hence, person is the special, possibly
  omitted thing for kids.
• This isnt really distinctly at odds with ATOM.
  Wexler suggests that the problem is with
  double-movement of the subject, but movement of
  the subject might itself be driven by person
  features in recent versions of the syntactic thy.

44
A pause to regroup

• HH observed a correlation between specified
  (finite) subjects and verbal form.
• Specifically,finite subjects seem to cause
  finite verbs. Not obvious why this would be under
  ATOM directly, but it might be something like
  what HH suggestthere is feature sharing between
  the subject and the AgrP. It might be interesting
  to see if finite subjects necessarily always
  show the reflex of AgrP and not necessarily of TP.

45
A pause to regroup

• The presence of be seems to be correlated with
  something like the stative/eventive distinction
  individual-level vs. stage-level properties.
• Jury is probably still out on which is crucial,
  because there is such overlap.
• Adult syntactic analyses put individual-level
  subjects higher, perhaps able to escape the UCC
  (double-movement) requirement.

46
BUCLD notes

• Friday
• Hamann on French functional categories in normal
  vs. impaired kids
• Kazanina Philipps on comprehension of aspect by
  Russian kids
• Berger-Morales Salustri on RIs and bilingual
  acquisition?
• Serratrice Sorace on overt and null subjects in
  Italian mono- bi-lingual acq.
• Sunday
• Sigurjonsdottir on RIs vs. finite verbs in
  Icelandic.
• Ud Deen Underspecd verb sand subject drop in
  Swahili
• Salustri Hyams Analogue of RI stage in NS lgs?

47
Comments about nina13

• When I did it
• I found about 70 relevant utterances (where there
  is a pronoun subject and the verb is unambiguous)
  to pass on to the subjects sheet.
• Of those I omitted around 10 as repetitions or
  otherwise uninformative.
• Be particularly careful about the lower bounds on
  these larger blocksnina13 is a bigger file than
  peter07, and so you will occasionally need to
  increase some of the numbers to get all of the
  utterances in.

48
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