A-Movement in Language Development
Misha Becker and Susannah Kirby
June 8, 2011
1
Introduction
Decoding the argument structure of a verb involves interpreting what roles the NPs play that a verb appears
with. In some cases, this is a fairly straightfoward task, given the fact that a single verb will tend to
consistently assign the same thematic roles to the same (local) positions. These patterns are particularly
transparent in agentive-transitive verbs, where the subject serves as the agent of the action, and the object
serves as the Patient/Theme of the action, as in (1).
(1)
a. The dog chased the cat.
b.
XP
X0
YP
the dog
(Agent)
X
ZP
chased
the cat
(Theme)
Verbs come out of the lexicon with idiosyncratic patterns of θ-assignment, and in accordance with
the θ-Criterion, these thematic requirements must be met at some initial stage in the construction of the
syntactic representation (at D-structure, or in newer terminology, at Merge). Sentences like (1) retain a
fairly transparent mapping between a verb and its semantic arguments.
However, some sentences do not retain this local configuration; in cases of A(rgument)-movement such
as passives (2) or raising (3) constructions, this basic configuration may be deformed, resulting in non-local,
nontransparent mappings between a verb’s idiosyncratic pattern of theta assignment and the final utterance.
1
(2)
The cat was chased e (by the dog)
(3)
The dog tends e to chase the cat
It seems reasonable to assume that constructions like (2) and (3) would be problematic for children, for
several reasons. First, as noted above, these utterances deform the canonical semantics-syntax mapping, by
“moving” NPs away from where their thematic roles are assigned. Secondly, the patterns of θ-assignment
themselves may be unusual; unlike typical verbs, raising verbs like tend and seem do not assign an agent
or experiencer role (or any other role) to their subject, and as a result, one of the argument positions is
left “empty,” semantically speaking. Thus, in (3), no thematic role is assigned to matrix subject position.
Meanwhile, in passives, a thematic role that is usually assigned—here, again, that of agent, usually assigned
to subject—is lost.
In short, the number and arrangement of (overt) NP arguments is deformed in A-movement structures.
Given the unusual status of this state of affairs with regard to the general patterns seen in agentive-transitive
verbs, this may result in difficulty or delays for language learners. This is especially likely, given the fact
that learners appear to exploit syntactic bootstrapping in learning (e.g. Gleitman, 1990; Naigles, 1990; Fisher
et al., 1991; Naigles, 1996; Gleitman et al., 2005). In order to use the number and configuration of arguments
to deduce the meaning of a novel verb, learners must assume that thematic relations are local to the main
predicate, and that the roles assigned to arguments are predictable based on general principles of thematic
alignment (Perlmutter and Postal, 1984; Baker, 1988). As a result, the acquisition of A-movement is of
particular interest to researchers working in child language acquisition.
In this chapter, we will discuss the acquisition of A-movement in first language, including the acquisition
of passives, unaccusatives, and subject raising and raising-to-object constructions. Before we discuss these
individual constructions in adult and child language, we will turn to the issue of A-movement at large, and
consider what linguistic features and representations such movement entails.
2
A-Movement in Adult Grammar
Argument movement, or A-movement, is a term used to describe the movement of an argument (i.e. a
NP/DP1 subject or object) from its base-generated (initial) position to some other c-commanding position
in the syntactic structure.
1 In the following discussion, we will be somewhat lax in using the terms NP and DP more or less interchangeably. Though
we do subscribe to a DP analysis of all NPs, the essence of the points made should hold, regardless of the theoretical stance.
Furthermore, using the term NP here will, in many cases, allow consistence with much of the GB literature referenced.
2
The term “A-movement” subsumes several distinct processes and predicate types, including passives,
unaccusatives, and raising verbs. To understand how A-movement generally works, we will need to make crucial reference to the notions of arguments and movement (including the motivations behind such movement),
and so it is to these issues that we now turn.
2.1
Arguments
Jaeggli (1986) notes that the term argument is used ambiguously in Chomsky (1981). In one sense, an
argument of a verb is any DP that holds a particular thematic/grammatical role for the verb: e.g. subject,
direct object, etc. In another sense, arguments are simply referential expressions (NPs) that may hold
thematic roles.
However, regardless of the sense in which the term is used, the notion of argumenthood (and by extension,
cases of A-movement) crucially relies on ideas about thematic assignment and θ-roles—in particular, the θCriterion (discussed in greater detail below). Jaeggli (1986, p. 590) in fact operationalizes the term by
suggesting the following formulation: “X = NP is an argument of Y iff X is assigned a θ-role listed in the
lexical entry of Y by Y or by a projection of Y.”
In the following sections we will present the most widely accepted movement-based analyses2 of these
constructions; this discussion will focus primarily on the analyses developed in Government and Binding
(GB) Theory (e.g. Chomsky, 1981, 1986) and the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995, 1998).
2.2
Movement in Government-Binding Theory
With the advent of the Revised Extended Standard Theory (Chomsky, 1973), and carrying over into early
Government-Binding theory (GB; Chomsky, 1981, 1986), the syntactic movements of elements as varied
as NPs, PPs, and wh-elements were reconceptualized as instantiations of the broader rule Move-α. As
a result, transformations like “passivization” and “raising,” which had previously been conceptualized as
2 A number of non-derivational approaches assume that no movement is involved in these constructions. Instead, “structure
sharing” analyses like LFG (Bresnan, 1982), GPSG (Gazdar et al., 1985), and HPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1994) assume that
a single argument occupies a position in both the matrix and embedded clauses. On the most abstract level, this proposal
overlaps significantly with transformational approaches, perhaps especially given current construals of movement as a process
of copying (i.e. multiple Merge) plus deletion (Chomsky, 1995), and the fact that movement-based analyses still on some level
require a single element to be linked to multiple positions, semantically. In this way, the learnability considerations with respect
to semantic linking and construal would be quite similar, regardless of the particular theoretic approach.
However, since structure-sharing approaches do not necessitate that the grammar contain any process of movement (or copydeletion) and/or multiple levels of derivation, they essentially represent a proper subset of the requirements that must be met
by a mental grammar, given a movement-based account. As a result, we will not consider these non-derivational approaches in
any detail here.
3
separate rules, were now subsumed under the same rubric, and subject to essentially the same syntactic
considerations (as we shall discuss below).
GB (and by extention, Minimalist) theories of A-movement require a number of key assumptions about
elements/modules that the grammar contains, including Move-α, the θ-Criterion, the projection principle,
the Case Filter, and multiple levels of syntactic representation. These assumptions combine to form the
basis of how GB conceptualizes the process of A-movement, and extend to comprise claims about the basic
grammatical constructs required for the acquisition of linguistic representations involving such movement.
2.2.1
Movement: Levels of Representation, C-Command, Traces, and Chains
GB suggests that the grammar’s syntactic component compiles items from the lexicon, in a manner which
satisfies their unique lexical requirements. This process forms “D(eep)-structures,” on which transformations
apply to construct abstract “S(urface)-structures,” which are then given phonetic and logical/semantic representations at PF (phonetic form) and at LF (logical form), respectively (PF and LF being the “interface
levels”). Thus, the GB model minimally requires the assumption of rules which can generate S-structures
from D-structures, and those which can map S-structures to PF and LF (Chomsky, 1981).
Syntactic movement—what GB calls Move-α (Chomsky, 1981)—is thought to apply when some element
would not be “interpretable” at one of the interface levels, if it were to remain in its current location. This
situation occurs as a result of abstract features not being “checked” on the the lexical item; the element
must move to have its features checked, usually by some functional projection (e.g. TP, DP) elsewhere in
the structure.
It is not logically required that movement be to c-commanding positions, but it appears that all applications of Move-α do result in such movement. This movement forms a “chain” between the moved element (in
the cases under consideration here, the DP) and the “trace” it leaves behind in its base-generated position
(this chain is usually represented via coindexation of the DP and the trace). A new (coindexed) trace is
generated with each successive application of the movement rule, such that a single moved DP may leave
behind multiple traces (if there are any intermediate landing spots). The movement chain (here, an A-chain)
is thought to represent not only a kind of “locational history” of the moved element, but also a current
relationship between that element and its previous locations; the moved DP retains access to the features
and thematic assignment related to those positions.
4
2.2.2
“Move-α”
The rule Move-α performs a wide range of functions, and subsumes previous notions of individual rules
which moved only wh-elements, only NPs or PPs, etc. (Chomsky, 1986). Because Move-α applies to so many
constituents, it is clearly a heavily used rule. However, its application is not entirely lawless, and several
general properties characterize it. For our considerations here, the most important constraint is that the
antecedent (i.e. the moved DP) must originate in a θ-position, but it may not move into one; this stricture
arises as a result of the θ-Criterion and the projection principle.3
2.3
The θ-Criterion and the Projection Principle
Movement is made possible (and constrained) given the notion of the θ-Criterion (“Each argument bears
one and only one θ-role, and each θ-role is assigned to one and only one argument”;4 Chomsky, 1981,
p. 36). Because lexical requirements, including thematic assignment, must be satisfied at D-structure,5
any arguments will (or better put, must) be licensed to appear in the structure by bearing a θ-role before
transformations (including Move-α) begin to apply. As a result, to avoid violating the θ-Criterion, DPs will
always originate in a θ-position, and they may only move into positions to which no θ-role is assigned.
The issue of θ-assignment remains important even after D-structure (i.e. after movement transformations
have begun to apply) due to the projection principle, which states that lexical requirements are maintained
at every level of the derivation—i.e., they are “projected” up through S-structure and LF.
Now that we have sketched a picture of where DPs might move from and to (that is, the beginning and
end points of A-movement), we turn to the issue of why A-movement might occur.
2.4
Case Theory
Movement of DPs is constrained by θ-theory, but it is made necessary given Case theory. The Case Filter
demands that every DP with phonetic content must have (abstract, if not morphological) Case. Only
3 The other two constraints are that (1) applications of the rule must respect subjacency, and (2) the trace must be “governed
in some sense” (Chomsky, 1981, p. 56). As these constraints are less crucial to the child data discussed below, we will not
consider them in any detail here.
4 This formulation of the θ-Criterion contrasts with semantically based (non-movement) analyses of so-called “raising” constructions (e.g. Jackendoff, 1972), as well as with more recent notions of control as movement (e.g. Hornstein, 1999), in which a
single argument may bear multiple thematic roles. We will not consider these proposals in any detail here, although Hornstein’s
proposal does bear on the broader acquisition findings presented in Kirby (2009). See the latter citation for more detail.
5 Chomsky (1981, p. 37) assumes that “if α subcategorizes the position β, then α θ-marks β. . . We will say that α θ-marks
the category β if α θ-marks the posisiton occupied by β or a trace of β. Note that α subcategorizes a position but θ-marks
both a position and a category.”
5
phonetically “null” DPs, like trace, escape this filter (Chomsky, 1981).6
DPs from the lexicon must be inserted into θ-positions at D-structure, but θ-positions are not always
Case positions. When a particular θ-position is not a Case position, the DP must move to get Case. Given
the θ-Criterion and Case theory, we end up with a system in which A-movement usually (if not always)
occurs from a θ-position into a Case position.7
In short, every lexical (i.e. overt) DP must have one (and only one) θ-role, as well as abstract Case.
θ-assignment happens at an initial stage in the derivation, and A-movement may apply to avoid Case Filter
violations, when the DP’s D-structure position is not a Case position. This is precisely what happens in
situations of passives, unaccusatives, and raising verbs. In the following sections we will discuss each of these
phenomena in turn.
But first, let us turn our attention to more recent formulations of A-movement within the Minimalist
Program, and how (and to what extent) these differ from the GB approach.
2.5
The Minimalist Program
Over the years, GB theory moved from highly specific rules for individual phenomena (e.g. passivization,
subject-to-subject raising) towards a system in which individual phenomena fall out from more general
rules (e.g. “Move-α”). The Minimalist Program (MP; e.g. Chomsky, 1995) constitutes a further step in the
attempt to streamline or remove any parts of the theory which relate only to particular constructions or
modules, leaving behind only the “conceptually necessary” components of the grammar (specifically, interface
levels, and the elements appearing at each of these levels), and the computations needed to construct them
(Chomsky, 1995, p. 169). These refinements result in several theoretical notions which distinguish the GB
and MP approaches to A-movement.
Perhaps the most important theoretical distinction between early GB accounts8 of movement and more
6 Another
null DP is the silent PRO involved in control constructions. PRO was originally hypothesized to not need Case
(Chomsky, 1981), but later this assumption was revised (Chomsky and Lasnik, 1993). We will not explore these hypotheses—or
the phenomenon of control—in any detail in this chapter; however, both Becker (2006, 2009) and Kirby (2009) have made
crucial use of the fact that certain raising and control constructions form surface-identical pairs.
(i) John seemed/tried to call Mary often. (subject raising/subject control)
(ii) John needed/told Bill to call Mary often. (raising-to-object/object control)
See those citations (and below) for more detail.
7 Chomsky (1986, p. 94) formulates these notions in a slightly different way, essentially reversing the order of operations:
“. . . let us assume that an element is visible for θ-marking only if it is assigned Case. . . A lexical argument must have Case, or
it will not receive a θ-role and will not be licensed.” However, the end result is the same: every overt DP must have a θ-role
and Case.
8 It should be noted that later GB accounts resembled MP accounts to a much larger extent.
6
current MP accounts relates to the circumstances under which movement may occur.9 Movement operations were initially conceptualized in the GB framework as applying essentially free of cost; there were no
limitations on when and where movement could apply (see the formulation of “Move-α” above).
However, later GB accounts, as well as accounts of movement in MP, have been formulated in a much
stricter way. Especially in MP, derivations are hypothesized to be economical, and movement is considered
to be a “Last Resort”: it occurs only when there is no other way to make a derivation converge (that is,
be “fully interpretable” or grammatical). Moreover, movement is only licensed for a lexical item which has
some uninterpretable abstract or overt feature (such as Case or agreement features) that must be checked
(or “erased”), in order for the derivation or structure to be licit; in MP, this notion that elements move only
to satisfy their own needs is referred to as the principle of “Greed.”
Most of our discussion of the empirical results on children’s acquisition of A-movement will be couched in
GB terms, as this framework was the dominant paradigm at the time the research presented was undertaken.
However, these results are generally also interpretable within MP, modulo (1) the assumption that movement
must be motivated by Greed (and as a Last Resort), and (2) the basic terminological differences between
the two frameworks.
3
Passives
In the GB framework, passive sentences such as (4a) below are generally assumed to derive from the form
in (4b), where the subject position is underlyingly empty.10
(4)
a. The peas were eaten (by Zoey).
b. e were eaten the peas (by Zoey).
9 Where (i.e. when) movement occurs in the derivation is another point which distinguishes the the two theoretical approaches,
and their answers arise to a great extent out of notions of the interface levels involved. GB proposes that items are removed
from the lexicon and assembled into a D-structure, after which point movements occur. In contrast, MP proposes that the
assembly of elements from the lexicon (“Merge”) and the movements of these elements proceed simultaneously; this allows MP
to dispense with the notion of D-structure. The competing claims about interface levels are not crucial to the results presented
below, and as such, we will not consider them in any detail here. Interested readers should consult and compare Chomsky
(1981) and Chomsky (1995).
10 The following discussion relates to verbal passives, which are in some cases homophonous in English with adjectival passives
(cf. The peas were eaten (by Zoey)/were gone (*by Zoey); adjectival passives are sometimes also called lexical passives). However,
the latter are not formed by A-movement but instead stored (as adjectives) in the lexicon. This homophony is, as you will see
below, important in interpreting some of the data on children’s acquisition of the English passive. See section 3.2 below.
7
Chomsky (1981) proposes that passives have two crucial characteristics. First, [NP, S]11 does not receive
a θ-role; thus, in accordance with the θ-Criterion, no NP may be present here at D-structure (in MP
terminology, at Merge). Secondly, the passive suffix -en (e.g. writt-en, driv-en) absorbs12 the Case that the
verb would otherwise assign to its complement. As a result, [NP,VP] cannot receive Case13 within the VP,
and the complement undergoes A-movement to a Case position in order to not violate the Case Filter. These
two characteristics result in a conceptualization of the passive in which the verbal morphology -en carries
features usually assigned to NPs: namely, it receives a θ-role and Case.
Note that the passive suffix is being claimed to carry some semantic weight. First, the passive in (4b)
may appear with an oblique by-phrase (by Zoey) which expresses the agent of the action; these are sometimes
called “full passives.” In such an oblique, the agent θ-role is transmitted to the by-phrase by the passive
suffix, which may optionally subcategorize for this PP. Jaeggli (1986) claims that when the agent by-phrase
does not appear, as in a so-called “short passive” (the peas were eaten), the verb’s external θ-role is carried
by the suffix itself, resulting in an “implicit argument” (specifically, that denoting the agent of the action).
Second, the passive suffix -en is assigned the object Case of the verb, so that movement of [NP,VP] is
forced by Case theory: the object NP must raise to receive its Case from the tensed INFL/T. This movement
also allows the passivized subject to check the EPP feature of INFL/T. Promotion of the lower NP into that
position is possible with respect to the θ-Criterion, since [NP,S] is no longer a θ-position. This means that
the structure of (4a) is that in (5).
(5)
a. The peasi were eaten ti
b. e[-θsubj , +Case] were eaten [+θsubj , -Case] the peasi
Jaeggli’s account makes several other verifiable predictions. First, it correctly predicts that clausal complements, which do not require Case in English, may appear in their unraised position (with a concomitant
expletive subject) in passives, as in (6).
(6)
It was believed that Zoey generally had a good appetite.
And second, this account predicts that in some languages, passives may appear with postverbal subjects,
assuming that two conditions are met. First, the language may not be an EPP language: it must not require
11 S is equivalent to TP in more current terminology. [NP,S] is the syntactic position of the semantic subject (and/or the
subject NP itself) of the sentence, and [NP,VP] is the verbal complement.
12 Jaeggli (1986, p. 591) defines the notion of “absorption” in the following way: a “passive suffix ‘absorbs’ the external θ-role
of a predicate simply by being assigned that θ-role. Nothing more is involved.”
13 In MP: have its Case feature checked/erased.
8
an overt NP subject.14 Second, the verbal complement must be able to receive (inherent nominative) Case
in this postverbal position (since the structural objective Case is absorbed by the passive suffix). While
these conditions are not met in English, they both obtain in Spanish, and as a result, postverbal subjects
do appear in passives, as seen in (7) (from Jaeggli, 1986).
(7)
En la fiesta fue presentada Marı́a por su padre.
at the party was introduced Maria by her father
“At the party Maria was introduced by her father.”
3.1
Typology of Passives
Keenan (1985) notes that passives play a more essential role in some grammars than in others, and that still
other languages lack passives entirely; furthermore, given that a language does use passives, there appears to
be a markedness hierarchy of what kind of passives appear. The most widespread are basic passives (e.g., The
peas were eaten): these have no agent (i.e., by-) phrase and are formed from a transitive main verb which (in
the active) takes an agent subject and patient object. Keenan suggests that if a language has any passives at
all, they will include basic passives. Indeed, some languages—including Latvian and some styles of Persian
and Classical Arabic (Comrie, 1977), Urdu, Amharic, Igbo, Shoshoni, and others (Siewierska, 1984)—allow
only these basic short passives; agents may not be expressed. Thus, although it has been suggested that
other languages (e.g. Kota, Palauan, and Indonesian) require an agent phrase in the passive (Siewierska,
1984), Keenan suggests that the following entailment relationships obtain: if a language has passives with
agent phrases, they will have them without; if it has passives of stative verbs, it will have passives of activity
verbs; and if it has passives of intransitive verbs, it will have passives of transitive verbs.
Complex (i.e., non-basic) passives include passives of internally complex transitive verb phrases (8),
passives of non-transitive verbs (including the subjectless “impersonal passives,” (9)), passives of ditransitive
verb phrases (in which the recipient or the location is passived, (10)), and passives with non-Patient subjects
(11) (these examples from Keenan, 1985).
(8)
John was believed to be an imposter
(believe to be an imposter = tvp)
(9)
Es wurde gestern getanzt
It became yesterday danced
“There was dancing yesterday” (German)
14 Alternatively, the EPP feature may not be D-marked, and may thus be checked by other types of XPs; this is the situation
in Icelandic and Faroese (Holmberg, 2000).
9
(10)
Fred was given the book
(11)
Nanasan-DRasoa
ny lamb any savony
washed-with-by-Rasoa the clothes the soap
“The soap was washed the clothes with, by Rasoa” (Malagasy)
3.2
Passives In Child Language: Empirical Results
In this section we review the literature on children’s comprehension and production of the passive construction. We begin with an overview of some older work in this area (on child English), then turn to more
recent experimental work on this construction. After discussing several of the major theoretical analyses of
children’s performance on the passive, we finally turn to developments based on cross-linguistic work. As
we will see, the main issues addressed by work in this area concern (a) whether passives are in fact difficult
(i.e. late acquired) for children, and (b) if so, why they are difficult.
3.2.1
Older Work: Passives are Difficult
One of the earliest investigations of children’s knowledge of the passive within modern linguistic theory
was conducted by Fraser, Bellugi and Brown (1963), who investigated children’s ability to comprehend,
imitate and produce a range of grammatical constructions. Among the ten constructions investigated was
the passive. Setting the stage for much work to follow, Fraser et al. found that children ages 3 to 4 years
(mean age of 40 months) displayed a great deal of difficulty with the passive construction. Only 12 out of
24 imitations of the passive were correct, only 7 (out of 24) comprehension (picture identification) responses
were correct, and only 2 (out of 24) productions of the passive were correct.
Slobin (1966) took investigation of the passive in a slightly different direction, both by examining knowledge of this construction in older children (kindergarteners through 6th -graders) and by measuring children’s
reaction times (RT) and errors in a Truth-Value Judgment (TVJ) task. Children were shown a static picture and were presented with a sentence that was one of four types: affirmative active (what Slobin called
“kernel”; (12a)), negative active (12b), affirmative passive (12c), or negative passive (12d).
(12)
a. The dog is chasing the cat.
b. The dog is not chasing the cat.
c. The cat is being chased by the dog.
d. The cat is not being chased by the dog.
10
In addition, Slobin constructed half of the sentences to be reversible, like those in (12) (in which both
NPs are possible agents), and half to be non-reversible (in which only one NP is a possible agent), such as
The girl is watering the flowers. Non-reversible kernel sentences, when passivized, become anomalous (#The
girl is being watered by the flowers).
Slobin found that the youngest children made the most errors overall, but this rate was still fairly low
(18.2%), showing that even these young children were not simply guessing in their responses. Slobin did not
report the error rate according to sentence type, but RT measurements showed a significant advantage of
nonreversibilility on responses to the passive sentences: subjects were significantly faster in responding to
nonreversible passives than to reversible passives, and they made fewer errors on the nonreversible passives.
In fact, response times (across subjects) to the nonreversible (affirmative) passives were slightly shorter (1.39
seconds) than response times to the nonreversible (affirmative) actives (1.45 seconds).
In the context of the syntactic theory being considered at the time (namely, Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures; 1957), Slobin was interested in evaluating whether the number of transformations within a structure
had an effect on the time needed to comprehend the respective sentence, and the resulting accuracy (in line
with previous psycholinguistic work by Mehler, 1963, and others). Since there is a syntactic transformation
associated with formation of the passive, but none related to reversibility, the strong effect of reversibility
could not be fully accounted for under that syntactic framework (neither could Slobin’s finding, consonant
with others’ results, that negative stimuli were slower and more errorful than affirmative passives). Therefore, Slobin suggested that the facilitative effect of nonreversibility on passives stemmed from semantic or
psychological effects, though he did not provide a more detailed analysis. He pointed out that some of the
discrepancy between reversible and nonreversible sentences might be accounted for in terms of anomaly,
but, interestingly, this cannot be the whole explanation. In particular, anomalous sentences (e.g. #The
girl is being watered by the flowers/#The flowers are watering the girl) induced twice as many errors as
the normal, non-anomalous nonreversible sentences (The flowers are being watered by the girl/The girl is
watering the flowers). Slobin’s assessment was that “anomaly tended to confuse and slow down responding”
(1966, p. 227). Therefore, some semantic effect other than anomaly appears to be a facilitating factor in the
nonreversible sentences.
Returning attention to younger children and to reversible passives, both Bever (1970) and Maratsos
(1974) found that while children right at age 3 (3;0–3;3) perform poorly in an act-out comprehension task
(29% correct in Maratsos’s study), children around age 3;6 show considerable improvement (72% correct).
But that improvement is short-lived. In the months that follow, children’s performance dips again (Marat-
11
sos’s children ages 3;8–3;11 were only 35% correct) before gradually rising back up (4;4–4;7-year-olds were
81% correct). This replicates the pattern reported by Bever (1970). The cause of this temporary dip in performance is not well explained and has not been discussed in more recent work (see section 3.2.2). Maratsos
suggested that as children grow, they become influenced by statistically more frequent constructions (i.e. the
NVN active structure) and overgeneralize this interpretation to other constructions. In this way, the child’s
expectation of the more frequent active construction interferes with interpretation of the passive word order.
Finally, children overcome this frequency-driven bias and are able to correctly interpret passive sentences.
Horgan (1978) also reported a late development of the full passive construction. Horgan performed an
elicitation task in which children ages 2 to 11 (and college-aged controls) were shown pictures and asked to
describe them. Some of the pictures contained an agent or instrument, such as a boy or a ball next to a broken
lamp, while others contained only the broken lamp. She found that the youngest children produced very few
full passives but frequently produced truncated (i.e. basic/short) passives (which, Horgan argued, should not
be analyzed as passives for the children, since they could be stative or adjectival). Among those children
who produced full passives, some produced only reversible passives and others produced only non-reversible
passives; children did not produce both types of passives until age 11.
Interestingly, Horgan’s argument is not that very young children are necessarily incapable of producing
full passives (since some of the 2-year-old children she studied did so), but rather that the semantics of the
passive takes a long time to acquire. Young children (ages 2–4) who produced only non-reversible passives
produced constructions with an instrument as the logical subject (the lamp was broken by the ball), not an
agent; these children did not produce non-reversible passives with an agent by-phrase until age 9. Thus,
the passive construction is not completely productive from a semantic point of view. Horgan suggests that
for children younger than 11, the passive is restricted to a non-agentive causation meaning, and might be
analyzed by children on analogy to other constructions such as reflexives (I was hammering and I got hit =
I hit myself with the hammer).
In summary, the early picture of the acquisition of the passive in English is that 3–4-year-olds have difficulty comprehending and producing the passive construction in general, children older than kindergarteners
can comprehend it but are helped when the construction is “nonreversible,” and children produce very few
full passives until age 10 or 11.
12
3.2.2
More Recent Work: Not All Passives Are Difficult
In the study by Maratsos, Fox, Becker and Chalkley (1985), research on children’s knowledge of the passive
turned to finer distinctions among verbs that are passivized (this study replicates findings by Maratsos et al.,
1979). Specifically, Maratsos et al. (1985) contrasted children’s comprehension of actional vs. non-actional
(mental verb) passives.
(13)
Grover is held by Ernie (actional)
(14)
Batman is liked by Superman (non-actional)
This distinction is important, because it points to the fact that the external argument of a passive can
be an experiencer rather than an agent, a fact that becomes relevant in later work on the passive (e.g. in
Fox and Grodzinsky, 1998).
In the first task, children were given sentences about Sesame Street characters and were asked “Who
did it?” (E.g., Experimenter: “Grover is held by Ernie. Who did it?”) Answers were indicated verbally
or by pointing to a finger puppet character. Although all children (4- and 5-year-olds) performed well on
the active sentences containing both types of verbs (90%) and passive sentences containing actional verbs
(67%—this number is clearly not at ceiling, but it is reportedly above chance), children performed poorly
on the passive sentences containing mental verbs (40%, not significantly different from chance). There were
no significant differences between the age groups, although, interestingly, the 5-year-olds were slightly worse
on the passive mental verbs (35%) than the 4-year-olds (47%).
The second task was a picture-selection task with children ages 4 to 11 years. For the mental verbs,
pictures included thought balloons, and for perception verbs (see, hear), one character in the picture was
blindfolded or wearing earmuffs, while the other character had unobstructed eyes or ears. Maratsos et
al. found that, similar to the previous experiment, while children in all age groups were statistically above
chance for the active sentences and the actional passives, the 4-year-olds were below chance (34% correct)
on mental passives. Children in older age groups were at or above chance on these items, but only children
in the oldest group (10–11 years) were at ceiling.
Maratsos et al. reject the explanations that children either do not have the formal categories of subject
and object, or that they do not hear enough instances of mental verbs used in the passive voice (although
they do note the infrequency of this construction in child-directed speech). Even the 7-year-olds in the
second experiment were at chance for non-actional passives, and Maratsos et al. estimate that neither of
13
these explanations are plausible for children as old as 7. As an alternative, the authors suggest that the
failure to comprehend mental passives has to do with a “general semantic constraint or condition” (Maratsos
et al., 1985, p. 186). They mention semantic “transitivity” as a possible candidate, where a predicate that
assigns an agent and a patient thematic role, such as break, would be high in transitivity, and a predicate
that assigns an experiencer subject or object, such as scare, would be lower. Transitivity might correlate
with passivization, such that children expect passives to be more likely (and therefore comprehend them
better) with verbs that take an agent subject and a patient object, than with verbs that take an experiencer
subject and theme object.
Borer and Wexler (1987) suggest an alternative explanation for Maratsos et al.’s asymmetry between
actional and non-actional passives. Namely, they point out that action verbs, appearing in the passive
without a by-phrase, are ambiguous between a verbal and an adjectival reading.
(15)
The doll was torn.
a. The doll was/is torn. (adjective)
b. The doll was torn by the girl. (verb)
Hebrew distinguishes morphologically between adjectival and verbal passives, and Borer and Wexler
note that children acquiring Hebrew acquire the adjectival form of the passive significantly earlier than
the verbal passive (Berman and Sagi, 1981; Berman, 1985). Thus, they suggest, English-acquiring children
likewise acquire the adjectival passive first—we just cannot distinguish the underlying difference on the
surface. Therefore, when an English-speaking child responds correctly to a passive sentence such as (15), she
is in fact analyzing it as an adjectival (or lexical) passive, which requires no NP-movement. Constructions
requiring NP-movement (i.e., verbal passives) are acquired much later due to constraints on the biological
maturation of these structures (see section 3.3.1 below).
While the foregoing research emphasizes children’s difficulty with the passive construction (notably in
comprehension tasks), there is evidence that children in fact produce passives in their own speech from quite
young ages, starting around age 3 to 3;6. Relevant here are the studies by Pinker, Lebeaux, and Frost (1987)
and Crain, Thornton, and Murasugi (1987).
Pinker et al. (1987) report findings from both naturalistic speech (from CHILDES files) and experimental
results involving elicited novel forms. The authors sought to distinguish between three possible explanations
of how the passive is acquired: (a) children are conservative learners, producing and comprehending only
those forms already encountered in the input (see Gordon and Chafetz, 1990), (b) children are fully productive
14
learners, allowing any transitive verb to be used in the passive, or (c) children are constrained productive
learners, allowing only certain transitive verbs (those that take a patient object) to be used in the passive.
The problem with option (b), the authors note, is that the passive is not in fact fully productive in adult
grammar. Certain transitive verbs, such as fit, cannot be passivized (The suit fits John; *John was fit by
the suit). Given that children do not receive negative evidence (Chomsky, 1959; Brown and Hanlon, 1970;
Morgan and Travis, 1989; Marcus, 1993), if children were to adopt strategy (b), which generates a superset
of the target grammar, it would be impossible for them to correct this assumption on the basis of positive
evidence only: hence, it raises a learnability conundrum.
In their spontaneous speech sample (Brown, 1973), Pinker et al. found 72 potential passives (counted
liberally—i.e. including likely adjectival forms like named and crowded) in Adam’s data, and 32 potential
passives in Sarah’s data. Of these, 25% of Adam’s and 22% of Sarah’s were “productive” in the sense that
they were forms that were ungrammatical in the adult grammar and therefore could not have been modeled
for the children, as in (16).
(16)
a. I don’t want the bird to get eated. (Adam 3;7)
b. He get died. (Sarah 3;8)
The fact that children produced passives they could not have heard in the input suggests that children are
not conservative learners in the sense suggested in strategy (a) above: this construction is at least partially
productive for them. Moreover, in their controlled experiments (see below), Pinker et al. found that children
were able to produce passive forms of novel verbs which had been previously taught to the children only in
the active voice, further supporting their claim that the passive is at least partially productive for children.
The authors conducted four controlled studies of both comprehension and production of novel verbs in
order to see whether children are fully productive in their formation of the passive (allowing all transitive verbs
in this construction) or if their production of the passive is limited to certain classes of verbs, e.g. actional
verbs. Across the four experiments, Pinker et al. manipulated either the lexical meaning of the novel
non-actional verbs (perception meaning or spatial meaning) or the theta roles assigned by the novel verb
(agent/location subject and theme object, or theme subject and agent/location object).15 They presented
novel verbs to children in either active or passive voice, and then tested comprehension (by an act-out task)
and production (by asking children to describe events). They elicited both the form the child already heard
(active, if the verb was presented in active voice) and the form the child had not heard (passive, if the verb
15 The ages of the children varied across the four experiments. Experiment 1 tested only 4-year-olds, experiment 2 tested 4
and 5-year-olds, and experiments 3 and 4 tested children ages 5–8.
15
was presented in active voice). Here we will focus on the production aspect of this study.
In eliciting the passive, the researchers were careful to establish the intended patient/theme as a topic
in the discourse (e.g. “Here’s the elephant. Nothing’s happening to the elephant. Now something’s going to
happen to the elephant. I want you to tell me what’s happening”; Pinker et al., 1987, p. 209).
Their main results can be summarized as follows:
• In the first experiment, which compared actional and perception verbs,16 children were more likely
to produce passives for verbs that were modeled in the passive than for those modeled in the active
voice (62% vs. 59% for action verbs, and 94% vs. 69% for perception verbs), a difference which Gordon
and Chafetz (1990) note supports at least some verb-based learning of the passive. However, children
produced novel productive passives with reasonable frequency (59% action verbs, 69% perception
verbs), which Pinker et al. take to indicate the existence of some kind of productive rule.
• The difference between (productive) actional and non-actional passives (59% vs. 69%) was non-significant
and clearly did not involve a categorical ban on non-actional passives.
• In experiments 3 and 4, which examined children’s willingness to passivize verbs according to their thematic role assignment, results showed that children were much less willing to passivize “anticanonical”
verbs (i.e. those verbs that assign a theme subject and an agent object role in the active voice17 ) than
canonical verbs (agent subject, theme object). The researchers elicited 69% passives from active-taught
canonical verbs, but only 28% passives from active-taught anticanonical verbs.
• Children easily passivize novel actional verbs that assign an agent subject role and a theme object
role (canonical verbs; experiment 1) and are highly resistant to passivizing novel actional verbs that
assign a theme subject and agent object role (anticanonical verbs; experiment 3); for verbs that assign
experiencer/location and theme roles, children were somewhat more likely to passivize those that
assigned their theme argument to the logical object, but the asymmetry was not as strong as for the
actional verbs (experiments 2 and 4).
These findings suggest that if children apply a semantic constraint to the application of the passive rule,
it is not one that limits the passive to verbs that take only an agent subject and patient object. That is,
children readily produced passives for verbs that assigned an experiencer subject and theme object (i.e. the
16 These verbs corresponded to activities which are not lexicalized in English, and had meanings like “to rub the back of the
neck of” (actional) and “to see through a binoculars-like instrument” (perception).
17 None of these anticanonical action verbs exist in English, nor do Pinker et al. (1987) mention any language in which they
do exist. An example for this category would be The dog floosed the giraffe, meaning ‘the giraffe leapfrogged over the dog.’
16
perception verbs in experiment 1). However, children were overall less willing to passivize certain types
of verbs. Children were moderately less likely to passivize non-actional verbs than actional verbs, but not
significantly so. Children were significantly less willing to passivize verbs that are considered “anticanonical,”
i.e., those that assigned a theme subject and an agent or location object. And children were somewhat less
willing to passivize verbs that have a spatial meaning, as compared with canonical actional verbs, instead
assigning a locative role to one of its arguments.
Strong resistance to passivizing anticanonical verbs follows if children’s rule for producing the passive
hinges on the Thematic Hierarchy (Jackendoff, 1972), which orders arguments within a sentence in terms of
decreasing animacy. That is to say, the argument that is highest on the Thematic Hierarchy should appear as
the subject of the sentence, while arguments that appear lower on the Hierarchy should surface as verbal and
prepositional complements, etc. The argument is that the surface subject of a passive (i.e. the logical object)
must be lower on the Thematic Hierarchy than the argument in the by-phrase (the logical subject), which
would result in preferentially allowing animate agent-obliques, and inanimate theme-subjects, in passives.
The milder but still notable resistance to passivizing spatial verbs observed by Pinker et al. suggests that
children’s rule for passive formation is not one that applies only to actional vs. non-actional classes of verbs,
nor one that categorically excludes verbs that assign certain theta-roles. Rather, Pinker et al. conclude that
children develop a productive rule for forming the passive that approximates a Thematic Hierarchy-driven
preference for passivizing canonical verbs and a gradual dispreference for passivizing less canonical verbs.
Verbs that assign an agent/experiencer subject and theme object are most easily passivized; verbs that assign
a location subject and theme object are less so; verbs that assign a theme subject and an agent/location
object are the least passivizable.
Another study that revealed early production of the passive in English-speaking children is that by Crain
et al. (1987), who found that even quite young (3- and 4-year-old) English-speaking children could produce
full passives in an elicited production task. As an example, the experimenter posed the following scenario:
(17) Exp: OK, there is this big heavy bus, and it’s coming along and it crashes into one of the cars. You
ask Keiko which car.
Child: Which car gets crashen by the big bus?
The fact that the child uses a novel form (crashen) is evidence that the child is producing the construction
based on a productive rule, rather than reproducing something modeled in the input.
17
Crain et al. argue that the act-out methodology masks children’s true early knowledge of the passive.
As a comparison, Crain et al. gave an act-out and a picture verification task to their subjects, and found
much worse performance on the act-out task (70%) than on the picture verification task (91%). They do not
provide quantitative results from their elicited production task, but they note that 29 of the 32 children they
interviewed produced at least 1 full passive, and 24 of the children produced 3 or more full passives. Thus,
the authors argue that that by manipulating the pragmatics of the scenario, full passives can be elicited
from children as young as 3;4, and that, consequently, the ability to form verbal passives cannot be lacking
in young children due to maturational factors (see section 3.3 below).
It bears mentioning, however, that (a) all of the predicates used in Crain et al.’s study are actional
verbs, not mental verbs (thus, they were the type of verb that younger children performed well on in the
Maratsos et al., 1985, study), and (b) a high proportion of children’s passives were get-passives (as in (17)
above) rather than be-passives. As a result, we next turn to Fox and Grodzinsky’s (1998) analysis of get and
be passives.
Fox and Grodzinsky (1998) (henceforth F&G) argue against Borer and Wexler’s (1987) claim (see section
3.3.1 below) that children have difficulty with passives due to an inability to form A-chains. They note the
finding by Crain et al. (1987), discussed above, that 3- and 4-year-olds produce passives in certain elicitation
tasks, and further observe that many of these children’s passives were get-passives. F&G’s evidence that
get-passives, like be-passives, involve an A-chain is based on the facts that get can intervene in an idiom chunk
(18), and that it can take an expletive subject (19), two traditional tests for verbs that allow NP-movement
(A-movement).
(18)
Tabs always get kept on foreigners in the U.S.A.
(19)
There (finally) got to be a lot of room in this house.
Thus, F&G argue, if children produce get-passives, those constructions involve A-movement and therefore
A-movement cannot be subject to (late) maturation. Rather, F&G suggest that young children’s difficulty
with passives has to do specifically with the by-phrase. They point out that children perform well in both
comprehension and production tasks on either short (truncated) passives (John was kissed/seen), or full
passives that have an actional verb (John was kissed by Mary). The problem case is full non-actional passives
(John was seen by Bill). F&G conducted an experiment that tested all of these types of constructions.
Eight of the 13 children in their study showed the expected pattern: perfect performance on actives, on
actional get- and be-passives, and on short non-actional passives. On the non-actional full passives, however,
18
these children were at chance. (Of the remaining children in their study, 2 showed adultlike performance, and
3 were at or below chance on both truncated and full non-actional passives; the latter group is problematic
for F&G’s account.)
F&G’s explanation of the results of their main group of subjects is that the by-phrase is problematic
for children because of a process they call θ-transmission—a process not used in active voice sentences. In
the derivation of the passive from the active form, the verb’s external argument is “suppressed” (since it is
not obligatorily spelled out in the passive; Jaeggli, 1986, and see section 3 above). F&G argue that in the
case of non-actional verbs, the external argument—which is in an adjunct position, and thus not governed
by the verb—cannot get a θ-role without the mechanism of θ-transmission. Theta-transmission involves the
by-phrase, which carries the θ-role belonging to the logical subject, transmitting that θ-role to the NP with
which it appears. However, it is precisely this mechanism which is problematic for young children. In the
case of actional verbs, the external argument is able to receive an agent (or affector) role directly, from the
homophonous (non-passive) preposition by, thus rendering θ-transmission unnecessary. F&G conclude that
this is why children selectively have trouble comprehending full (nontruncated) non-actional passives—in
those constructions, the by-phrase argument requires an experiencer role, which cannot be assigned directly
by the non-passive by, and therefore requires θ-transmission.
The studies discussed so far have focused on children’s grammatical ability to comprehend and produce
passive constructions. But an experiment by O’Brien et al. (2006) manipulated the pragmatic conditions
under which a by-phrase might be warranted. The authors point out that in a scene in which there is only
one possible agent/experiencer argument, it is somewhat infelicitous to spell out the agent in a by-phrase;
rather, a short passive is sufficient to accurately describe the scene. But if there are multiple potential
agents, it is most felicitous to indicate which of those characters is the agent. For example, if Mickey is
chasing Donald, and Pluto—another potential chaser—is also standing nearby, it is felicitous to describe the
scene as “Donald is being chased by Mickey.” This method was employed in the Crain et al. (1987) study
described above; one of the chief contributions of the O’Brien et al. study is that they looked at nonactional
verbs as well as actional verbs.18
The result of O’Brien et al.’s first experiment was that children (ages 4–4;10) were significantly above
chance on all types of stimuli: long and short passives, with both actional and non-actional verbs. The
authors do not state whether the difference in performance between long non-actional (82%) and short
non-actional passives (100%) was significant.
18 In their first experiment they report results from only one non-actional verb, see. They had tested hear as well but found
very poor performance on that particular verb. In their second experiment O’Brien et al. tested both see and like as non-actional
verbs.
19
In a second experiment, slightly younger children (mean age 3;6) were given long actional and nonactional passives in two conditions. In one of the conditions, only a single potential agent/experiencer was
present, and in the other condition an additional agent/experiencer was present. By manipulating this factor
(the number of potential agents or experiencers) within the experiment, the researchers could test for this
effect directly. They found that the children in this experiment performed significantly above chance on both
actional and non-actional passives in the condition with the extra agent/experiencer, but not above chance
in the other condition (single agent/experiencer), confirming their prediction.19
In summary, many of these studies indicate that passives are not problematic for children across the
board. Instead, some show that certain types of verbs are more readily passivized than others (Maratsos
et al., 1985; Pinker et al., 1987), or that by manipulating pragmatic conditions, children’s performance on
passives (either in production or comprehension) can be improved (Crain et al., 1987; O’Brien et al., 2006).
Nevertheless, pace Crain et al. and O’Brien et al., the received wisdom has been that before age 5, children
are not uniformly correct in interpreting all types of passives, and therefore, in some sense, their grammatical
knowledge of the passive is not quite adultlike. Thus, various theoretical accounts of children’s knowledge
of the passive have been put forth. We turn to these accounts now.
3.3
Accounting for Passive Acquisition: Theoretical Approaches
Researchers have struggled to account for children’s acquisition of the passive, since this has appeared to
be delayed with respect to that of the active. The major division in the literature has been between those
researchers who believe passive acquisition relates to linguistic maturation, and those who do not. In the
following sections we discuss the maturation account and alternative approaches.
3.3.1
Maturation of A-Chains
The relatively late acquisition of the passive documented in languages like English, German, and Hebrew
prompted Borer and Wexler (1987, 1992) to propose the linguistic maturation hypothesis;20 according to this
hypothesis, certain constructions in UG (including those involving A-chains, such as the passive) are not
immediately available to the child, but rather mature over time, just as do secondary sex characteristics.
19 A
reviewer points out that children may also be good at correctly accepting long passives in a “match” condition even when
there is no extra potential agent in the situational context, but they may have difficulty correctly rejecting a long passive in a
“mismatch” condition. Since O’Brien at al. do not break down their results according to match vs. mismatch items, it is not
possible to tell whether this manipulation led to a significant difference in performance.
20 This approach contrasts most noticeably with the continuity hypothesis of Pinker (1984), according to which both children
and adults have access to the same UG-constrained linguistic knowledge.
20
Structures relevant to the passive are assumed to mature around the age of 4;0.21 Before this age, the
A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis posits that A-chains are ungrammatical for the child, and predicts that passives
will therefore not appear in spontaneous speech, and will not be comprehended by children. The naturalistic
and experimental findings of other researchers (e.g. Horgan, 1978; Pierce, 1992a) have been interpreted as
providing support for the maturation hypothesis (Borer and Wexler, 1987; Pierce, 1992a).
However, other observations have cast doubt on this claim, requiring that Wexler and his colleagues
reformulate their hypothesis. For instance, Borer and Wexler (1987) initially argued that pre-mature children
have trouble forming A-chains of any kind. But the widely accepted VP-internal subject hypothesis (among
others, Koopman and Sportiche, 1991)—according to which all DP subjects are generated in SpecVP and
then raise to SpecTP, thereby forming an A-chain—proved problematic for this conceptualization of the
maturation hypothesis, since children seem to have no trouble with this type of subject raising (see also Fox
and Grodzinsky, 1998; Köppe, 1994). Borer and Wexler (1992) relax their approach somewhat by suggesting
that the only problematic A-chains are those relating two potential θ-positions: the so-called “(subject,
object)” (Babyonyshev et al., 2001) or “nontrivial” (Chomsky, 1995; Guasti, 2002) A-chains.
A number of distinct approaches (discussed in the next section) have taken issue with the notion that
components of UG may not be available to children, instead suggesting that some other issue—either grammatical or pragmatic—lies behind children’s “problems” with the passive. And more recently, work examining children’s acquisition of other types of A-movement (including subject raising and raising-to-object; see
sections 5 and 6, respectively) support these non-maturational accounts by providing evidence that children
have very little trouble with either trivial or non-trivial A-chains.
3.3.2
Non-Maturational Approaches
As we will see in section 3.4 below, a significant amount of cross-linguistic data has been presented which
appears to disconfirm the maturation approach. But even before considering these results, researchers have
suggested alternative accounts, which do not appeal to linguistic maturation, for the late acquisition of the
passive in languages such as English.
For example, Weinberg (Berwick and Weinberg, 1984; Weinberg, 1987) argued for an account of children’s
passive acquisition based on Markedness Theory. In addition, several researchers have proposed that the
“late” acquisitional status of the passive may only be apparent; specifically, naturalistic data may have been
21 It should be noted that the age of maturation was later revised to about 7 years (Wexler, 2004; Hirsch and Wexler, 2007).
The A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis has also been revised in this later work to be formulated in terms of phasal syntax (Chomsky,
2001); see section 5.1 .
21
incorrectly interpreted. For instance, Crain and Fodor (1993) and Pinker et al. (1987) have pointed out
that the corresponding scarcity of full passives in naturalistic adult speech is never interpreted as a lack of
grammatical knowledge, but instead as evidence that the passive is simply a marked construction. The same
could reasonably hold true of children’s speech.
Likewise, some experimental studies indicating late access to passives have suffered from methodological
flaws, including—but certainly not limited to—the type of pragmatic infelicity addressed by O’Brien et al.
(2006). Due to such experimental flaws, Crain and Fodor (1993) suggest that in many cases, the actual
cause for children’s errors on experimental tasks is not a lack of linguistic maturity, but rather the result
of nonlinguistic cognitive demands, including sentence parsing, the planning of responses, and pragmatic
presuppositions. This nonlinguistic maturation hypothesis proposes that experimental linguistic performance
improves over time due to the maturation of these extra-linguistic cognitive abilities. Indeed, results from a
number of other experiments have indicated at least partial, if not full, mastery of the passive by children
younger than age 4 (seen in sections 3.2.2 above and 3.4 below). These results come from experimental designs
that minimize nonlinguistic cognitive demands, provide felicitous pragmatic contexts for use of the passive,
or even examine a language with a passive distinct in its characteristics from the English construction.
For instance, Borer and Wexler (1987) had specifically claimed that any passives which did appear
in English-acquiring children’s speech at this young age were not verbal (syntactic) passives, but instead
adjectival (lexical) passives; recall that the two are homophonous in English, but the latter involve no Achain. Grimm (1973) found evidence that seemed to support this proposal. Although German verbal passives
differ from adjectival passives in their choice of auxiliary (werden ‘become’ vs. sein ‘be’, respectively) and
are thus not entirely homophonous, Grimm found that a common error in a repetition experiment was to
replace werden with sein, which suggests that children perceive the two as similar, if not identical; this
could be taken as support for Borer and Wexler’s adjectival-passive hypothesis. However, as detailed more
fully in section 3.4 below, Demuth (1989) reports acquisition of the passive by age 2;8 in Sesotho, a Bantu
language in the Niger-Congo language family, which has verbal—but no adjectival—passives. Moreover,
Eisenbeiss (1993) reports for German that in a picture identification task, children ages 2;0 and older chose
the correct picture 90% of the time for verbal passives, and there was even a strong tendency (70%) for
2-year-olds to incorrectly interpret adjectival passives as verbal passives. Likewise, in an elicited production
task in the same study, even children younger than 4 produced verbal passives. In light of these facts, it
seems unlikely that all early passives are lexical rather than syntactic, and it may prove that experimental
design is to blame for the discrepancy between Eisenbeiss’s study and earlier claims about late acquisition
of the passive in German. One possibility is that a sentence-imitation task (used by Grimm) may introduce
22
non-linguistic cognitive demands of the sort discussed by Crain and Fodor, while a picture-identification
task (used by Eisenbeiss) reduces the cognitive load. In short, extra-linguistic cognitive demands may have
masked German-speaking (and other) children’s true linguistic competence. Eisenbeiss’s data, however, does
indicate that the distinction between sein passives and werden passives is not fully adultlike at this young
age, as the 2-year-olds showed a tendency to misinterpret adjectival passives as verbal passives in the pictureID task. This result is especially noteworthy as it directly contradicts Borer and Wexler’s claims that early
passives are adjectival rather than verbal.22
Such evidence that children presented with pragmatically felicitous and experimentally controlled circumstances can comprehend and use the passive earlier than age 4;0 seems to provide clear evidence against
the linguistic maturation hypothesis. Likewise, much of the aforementioned data has come from languages
in the Indo-European family, but a growing body of evidence from children acquiring non-Indo-European
languages indicates that much of the previously documented performance on passives is not a result of maturation (linguistic or nonlinguistic), but is rather dependent on language-specific factors. In section 3.4, we
turn to this cross-linguistic data. First, though, a note about accounts of non-passive A-movement in child
language.
3.3.3
Theoretical Approaches to Non-Passive A-Movement
While we have presented these maturational and non-maturational approaches in the context of children’s
acquisition of the passive, similar accounts have also been proposed for each of the other types of A-movement
that we will discuss below. Given our discussion of A-movement in adult grammar, it should be clear that—
just as the existence of a rule “Move-α” would suggest—all the types of A-movement make use of similar
linguistic features and representations. As a result, it seems reasonable to assume that the acquisition of
these grammatical elements should underlie the acquisition of each of these constructions. That is to say,
there should be some “acquisition of A-movement” independent of, e.g., acquisition of the passive, acquisition
of unaccusatives, etc. However, such an assumption does not equate to the prediction that once one of these
types of A-movement appears in the child’s grammar, all the other types should, as well. In some cases,
other issues may be at play: for instance, MLU or working memory (and whatever other abilities these issues
relate to) may be strongly implicated in the cases of longer construction types, such as raising-to-object.23
22 As a side note, Borer and Wexler (1987) did not conduct an experiment of their own, but rather reported on naturalistic
production (e.g., Berman and Sagi, 1981, cited therein, for Hebrew) and experimental data collected by other researchers (e.g.,
for English, Horgan, 1978; Maratsos et al., 1985).
23 See Sano (2000) and Sano et al. (2001) for arguments that the non-simultaneous acquisition of different A-movement
constructions provides counterevidence to the A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis.
23
In general, though, the accounts of (non-passive) A-movement in L1A that have been suggested in the
literature tend to fall into these two main subcategories (specifically, linguistic and non-linguistic maturation),
and the reader is encouraged to keep these approaches in mind as they examine the empirical findings
presented below. In the coming sections, we will return to accounts of the acquisition of other types of
A-movement in more detail, especially in the cases where researchers have detailed new analyses that do not
fit so neatly into one of these two general camps.
3.4
Cross-linguistic Findings on Acquisition of the Passive
Our understanding of children’s ability to produce and comprehend the passive has been enhanced by crosslinguistic work. Some cross-linguistic evidence has indicated a late acquisition of the passive similar to
that claimed for English. For instance, Mills (1985) reports that German-acquiring children produced no full
passives before age 6;0, that sein (adjectival) passives are more frequent in children’s productions than werden
(verbal) passives, and that in comprehension tasks, German-speaking children (incorrectly) apply an active
construal to passive sentences until about age 7 (that is, they interpret the first NP as an agent/experiencer).
Berman (1985) also reports a very late acquisition of the verbal passive in child Hebrew (age 8), but an earlier
acquisition of the adjectival passive, which is morphologically distinct from the verbal passive. Terzi and
Wexler (2002) report that the verbal passive in Greek is acquired much later than the adjectival passive in
that language.
On the other hand, several studies of non-Indo-European (and non-Semitic) languages have suggested a
much earlier facility with this construction. In this section, we discuss some of these findings in detail.
Demuth (1989) presents data from children acquiring Sesotho (a Bantu language) showing that as early
as age 2;8, children use the passive in spontaneous (non-imitative) production, and argues against Borer
and Wexler’s maturation account of the English passive. Her argument is based on two claims: (a) Sesotho
children produce this construction spontaneously at very early ages, and (b) Sesotho has no adjectival
passive construction; all of these children’s passives are verbal, and therefore involve NP-movement to subject
position (A-movement). Similarly, Suzman (1985) found that Zulu-acquiring children begin using the passive
productively around age 2;6 to 3 years. (Zulu, like Sesotho, is a Bantu language; its passive construction
has similar properties to those of the Sesotho passive, and it is similarly frequent in both adult-directed and
child-directed speech.) The passive utterances Suzman observed at that age were non-imitative, although
she notes that the contexts in which children uttered passives were semantically and pragmatically limited.
24
Demuth’s data include spontaneous utterances obtained as part of a longitudinal study of four children
over a 2-year period. The overall proportion of passives is admittedly low, ranging from 0.4% of all utterances
to 2.1% for the children (compared to adult caregivers, who produced passives in 6% of their spontaneous
utterances in this sample), and some of the earliest passive productions may have been rote-learned forms
(since at the earliest stage as many as 41% of the children’s passives were modeled on forms that were
frequent in the discourse). However, Demuth notes that by age 2;8, children are producing passives quite
productively (i.e. using non-rote forms), including full reversible passives, impersonal passives, and passives
in both declaratives and interrogatives. Thus, Demuth argues, Sesotho-speaking children can form A-chains
by age 2;8, considerably younger than the age proposed by Borer and Wexler.
It appears that very young Sesotho-speaking children produce verbal passives spontaneously. The implication of this finding is that if Sesotho children have A-chains, then perhaps at least some of English-speaking
children’s passives are verbal passives too, and not simply adjectival passives. That is to say, even if the
ability to form A-chains is something that matures in young speakers, if some Sesotho children give evidence
of having reached this maturational stage by age 2;8, then presumably English-speaking children reach this
stage at roughly the same age.
In more recent work by Demuth et al. (2010), Sesotho-speaking 3-year-olds were given a picture identification task (to test comprehension), as well as elicited production and novel verb generalization tasks
(to test production). In the comprehension task, the children were better in responding to active than
passive prompts (82% correct on actives, 73% correct on passives), though their performance on the passive
prompts was still quite high compared to results reported for English-speaking children. The children also
showed a slight (but non-significant) advantage of actional passives (77%) compared to non-actional passives
(69%). Interestingly, adult controls performed significantly worse on non-actional than actional passives
(89% vs. 99%), but showed equal performance on actives vs. passives overall. Demuth et al. suggest that
worse performance on non-actional verbs, for both children and adults, stems from difficulty in achieving an
accurate mental depiction of these predicates.
In the elicited production task, children were shown a picture of an action, asked to point to each of
the characters depicted (e.g. a girl, a boy, and a mother), and were given a verbal description of the event
(“This is kissing”) and then asked about the patient (“What is happening to the boy?”). In each picture a
third character was depicted who observed the event but did not take part.24 This task resulted in at-ceiling
performance: in 95% of agent prompts, children produced an active sentence, and in 98% of patient prompts,
24 The inclusion of a third character was motivated by O’Brien et al.’s (2006) finding that English-speaking children performed
better on non-actional full passives when the presence of an additional referent made a full passive statement about the patient
more felicitous.
25
children produced a correct passive construction (although only 25% of their passives included a by-phrase).
In the novel verb generalization experiment, the child was taught two novel verbs by being shown a novel
action (e.g. boy and girl dolls riding on a see-saw, so that one character slid down or fell off the see-saw).
One of the verbs was modeled in the active voice and the other was modeled in the passive voice. For
active-modeled verbs, the passive was then elicited by asking “What is being done to the boy/girl?” For
passive-modeled verbs, an active form was elicited (“What is the boy/girl doing?”). The result was that all
children successfully produced novel passives when asked patient-focused questions; 95% of these included
correct passive morphology and 65% had a by-phrase.
The passive construction in Sesotho and Zulu (as well as in Quiche Mayan and Inuktitut, discussed
below) is formally akin to that in English and other Indo-European languages; that is, each involves Amovement operating under similar morphosyntactic demands. As a result, it cannot be argued that Sesothoor Zulu-speaking children acquire the passive earlier due to the relative simplicity of the construction in their
language (for instance, if there were no A-chain involved). Moreover, if children acquiring these languages
show mastery of these forms at such a young age, it cannot be the case that A-movement only biologically
matures after the age of 4.
What must be explained, then, is why English-speaking children appear to acquire the passive later than,
e.g., Sesotho-speaking children. One possibility is that they do not in fact acquire it later, and their early
“adjectival” passives are in fact true verbal passives. Another possibility is that there is a true cross-linguistic
asymmetry in the development of this construction, and it is linked either to typological differences between
the target grammars or to effects of input frequency. Passives are used more frequently in Sesotho caregivers’
speech (6%) than in English-speaking caregivers’ speech (0%, according to Brown, 1973; 0.036% according
to Gordon and Chafetz, 1990). In a study based on a more extensive language sample (98 hours), Kline
and Demuth (2010) report that parents use passives in 2.7% of their utterances to children, and that 60% of
those passives are full passives. Parents of English-speaking children produce by-phrases in only about 4%
of their passives (Gordon and Chafetz, 1990).
In addition to the frequency of the construction in speech to children, Demuth et al. (2010) suggest
that another advantage for Sesotho-speaking children over English-speaking children is that the passive in
Sesotho is morphologically unambiguous. That is, while the English short (i.e. agentless) passive is ambiguous
between a verbal and adjectival structure, in Sesotho the two constructions are morphologically distinct, and
this may provide cues for learners about distinguishing the true passive construction. On the other hand, it is
worth noting that the verbal and adjectival passives in Hebrew are, like in Sesotho, morphologically distinct,
26
and yet Hebrew-speaking children acquire the verbal passive at quite a late age, around age 8 (Berman,
1985; Borer and Wexler, 1987).
Allen and Crago (1996) discuss spontaneous speech data from four Inuit children acquiring Inuktitut
natively. As in Bantu languages, Inuktitut’s verbal and adjectival passives are morphologically distinct. The
children, ages 2;0 to 2;10 at the start of the nine-month study, produced verbal passives quite frequently,
averaging about 2.8 passives per hour of recorded speech, or about 2.55% of their verbal utterances. (Based
on Pinker et al.’s 1987 study of English from the CHILDES database, Allen and Crago report that Englishspeaking children produced about 0.4 passives per hour of recorded speech.)
Although the majority of the children’s passives are short forms (which include no overt agent) and
involve an actional verb, Allen and Crago point out that (a) since Inuktitut is a null argument language,
leaving out the agent is extremely natural in speech, and (b) children do produce more complex passive
forms, such as full passives,25 passives with experiencer verbs (see, want), the “habitual” passive, passives
containing a non-patient internal argument (i.e. subject), and passivized causative structures.
To explain the earlier acquisition of the passive in Inuktitut as compared to English, Allen and Crago
point to the more frequent occurrence of the passive in adult caregiver speech: 7.8 passives per hour in
adult Inuktitut vs. 1.1 passives per hour in adult English (calculated based on data reported in Gordon and
Chafetz 1990).26
In addition to frequency, Allen and Crago note other aspects of the grammar of Inuktitut that might
contribute to their early acquisition. One is that, due to the highly inflected nature of the language, speakers
tend to use strategies to avoid producing two-argument sentences, since the verb would then have to agree
with both arguments. One way to avoid a two-argument structure is to use a passive, which requires
agreement with only one argument; this is a strategy that may be used by both child and adult speakers of
Inuktitut.
Allen and Crago suggest that another possible explanation for the early productive passive in child
Inuktitut is that Inuktitut employs far more NP-movement than a language like English. Inuktitut is an
ergative language, and according to some syntacticians, the object of a transitive verb must undergo raising in
25 Most
of the full passives are produced by one subject, Juupi, who has a higher MLU at earlier ages than the other children.
do not necessarily advocate a frequency-based explanation of cross-linguistic asymmetries in the acquisition of the passive. Some studies in which children received extra exposure to the passive construction report an improvement in performance
on passive constructions (Gordon and Chafetz, 1990), while others report no such advantage (Maratsos et al., 1985). Hyams
et al. (2006) also point out that children produce many forms that are not attested in their input (e.g. Root Infinitives) and
fail to produce large proportions of constructions that are extremely frequent in parental speech (e.g. imperatives). However,
it is noteworthy that in the languages in which children are reported to acquire the passive early, this construction is also more
frequent in caregiver speech as compared to languages in which children are reported to acquire the passive late. Thus, the role
of input frequency in the acquisition of this construction remains an open question.
26 We
27
order to receive Case (Bittner, 1994). Under this assumption, and given the assumption of the VP-internal
subject hypothesis, both subject and object must raise to get case. In English—and given GB-theoretic
notions of syntactic structure and movement—only the subject must raise from SpecVP to SpecIP to get
Case. It should be noted, however, that under more current MP assumptions (e.g. Chomsky, 1995), both
subject and object DPs are hypothesized to move for Case reasons: subjects to AgrS P, and objects to AgrO P.
If this syntactic analysis is on track, Allen and Crago’s second possible explanation could not account for
the cross-linguistic differences in acquisition.
Pye and Poz (1988) report similarly early acquisition of the passive in Quiche Mayan. In spontaneous
speech samples, they found that children use the passive construction productively in their speech at roughly
8 times the frequency of English-speaking children, starting from the age of 2;1. In a comprehension (pictureselection) task, they also found that their 4- and 5-year-old Quiche-speaking subjects were significantly above
chance on actional passives, marginally above chance on non-actional passives, and (unexpectedly, given the
English data) at chance on actional and non-actional actives. Pye and Poz note, however, that Quiche actives
containing two third-person referents are ambiguous with respect to their theta-role assignment (i.e. agent
vs. patient), and that this may have impeded the children’s performance on those items.
While the evidence from Bantu languages, Inuktitut, and Mayan appears to point rather uniformly to
early comprehension and production of the passive, the evidence from Japanese seems to indicate a delay
in the acquisition of this construction. However, the cause of the delay remains a point of disagreement.
Some authors have argued in favor of A-chain maturation as the explanation (Sugisaki, 1999; Minai, 2000;
Machida et al., 2004), while others have argued against this account (Sano, 2000; Sano et al., 2001; Okabe
and Sano, 2002).
Based on Miyagawa (1989) and Kubo (1990), Sugisaki (1999) argues for (at least) two types of passives
in Japanese: accusative (gapped) passives (also called “direct passives”), which involve an A-chain (shown
in (20)), and gapless (or “adversity”) passives, which do not (shown in (21)).
(20)
Taro-no yuuki-gai
ookunohito-ni ti tatae-rare-ta
Taro-gen courage-nom many people-by praise-pass-past
“Taro’s courage was praised by many people.”
(21)
Hanako-ga ame-ni fur-are-ta
Hanako-nom rain-dat fall-pass-past
“Hanako had rain fall on her.”
Sugisaki provides experimental evidence that children acquiring Japanese (ages 3 to 5) may have acquired
28
both types of passives or neither type, but if they have acquired only one, it will be the gapless passive.
He concludes that the gapless passive is acquired earlier than the accusative/gapped passive, which involves
A-movement, in support of the A-chain maturation hypothesis.
Sano et al. (2001) argue, on the other hand, that children perform better on “full unaccusatives”27 (these
are unaccusative verbs with a by-phrase; illustrated in (22)) than on full passives.
(22)
Zou-san ga buta-san ni 2-hiki tukamat-ta
elephant nom pig
by 2-cl catch(unacc.)-past
“Two elephants were caught by the pig.”
Since both full passives and full unaccusatives involve A-movement, Sano et al. argue that children’s
difficulty with the passive is not due to problems forming A-chains per se, but rather to problems with the
passive suffix -rare.
All these cross-linguistic findings have important implications for explanations of English-speaking children’s apparent difficulty with the passive. If children acquiring Language X have difficulty with a construction, while children acquiring a different Language Y produce and comprehend the construction much
earlier, the apparent difficulty in the Language X cannot be due to biological reasons. Babyonyshev et al.
(2001) point out, however, that many of these studies assume, rather than demonstrate, that the passive
constructions in these languages follow an English-like structural derivation. Thus, there may be room for
debate over whether the earlier acquisition of passives in languages like Inuktitut and Sesotho constitute
evidence against claims such as the A-chain maturation hypothesis.
Indeed, a number of arguments have been made that the above cross-linguistic data does not necessarily
speak against the A-chain maturation hypothesis. As pointed out by Hyams et al. (2006), Crawford’s (2004)
reanalysis of Demuth’s (1989) Sesotho data argues for an “adversity passive” analysis of the children’s
constructions, involving an applicative structure and no A-movement. Similarly, Johns (1992) argues that
passives in Inuktitut involve a kind of nominalization and do not involve A-movement. Hyams et al. suggest,
instead, that A-movement may in fact be problematic for children—but only when the application of this
movement results in a non-canonical ordering of thematic arguments (their Canonical Alignment Hypothesis,
or CAH). Specifically, they argue that children expect that a verb’s external argument (usually an agent) will
map to subject position (SpecIP or SpecTP), and that children will experience difficulty when this alignment
does not obtain; this is precisely what happens in verbal passive constructions, though not in unaccusatives
or raising-to-subject constructions (discussed below). In their own data on Malagasy, Hyams et al. report
27 See
section 4 for more information about unaccusatives in adult and child speech.
29
findings from three children studied longitudinally (age 1;6 to 2;8) indicating that the children produce a
passive-like construction quite early. However, on the basis of other properties of child and adult Malagasy,
Hyams et al. also argue that these constructions, in which a theme argument gets promoted to a subject-like
position, actually involve topicalization, and therefore A0 -movement instead of A-movement. The CAH will
again become important when we discuss children’s acquisition of raising-to-object, in section 6 below.
While a rich literature is devoted to children’s acquisition of the passive, less attention has been paid to
other constructions involving A-movement, including unaccusative verbs, raising-to-subject and raising-toobject constructions. We now discuss each of these constructions in turn.
4
Unaccusatives: Inherently Passive Verbs
Unaccusative verbs are those intransitive verbs which assign only a single internal θ-role; that is, semantically,
they take only a patient/theme argument (Perlmutter, 1978). The GB account of unaccusatives, due to
Burzio (1986), is that if a verb does not assign an external θ-role, it will also fail to assign Accusative Case.
As a result, the argument generated within the VP of an unaccusative verb must raise—for Case reasons—to
SpecTP, to be assigned nominative Case. In this position, it acts as the subject of a sentence, including
triggering agreement with the verb. Importantly, though, this promotion of the complement NP to SpecTP
involves the same type of A-chain as that found in passives.
Thus, a sentence like (23a) has a representation as in (23b) (see also Guasti, 2002). Unaccusative verbs
in English include members like arrive, come, go, remain, descend, climb, run, and fall28 (Burzio, 1986).
(23)
a. Karli has arrived ti
28 Burzio
labels these verbs ergatives, to distinguish them from non-ergatives (for more discussion on which, see below).
30
b.
TP
DP
T0
Karli
T
T
VP
V
T
hasj
-past
V0
V
VP
tj
V0
V
DP
arrived
ti
Unaccusatives contrast with the class of unergative verbs, a second type of intransitive. Unergatives,
which include such agentive verbs as shout, talk, hide, hate, and think (Burzio, 1986), differ from unaccusatives in that they project only a single external θ-role and—crucially, for our interest here—involve no
A-chain (Pierce, 1992b). This difference in underlying structures between unaccusatives and unergatives
can be observed in the contrast in (24)–(25). Because the unergative argument is base-generated in subject
position (rather than raising into this position, as is the case for the unaccusative), it may never appear
postverbally; however, the unaccusative argument may appear postverbally (i.e. unraised) with an expletive
subject.
(24)
There arrived three men.
(25)
* There shouted three men.
4.1
Unaccusatives In Child Language: Empirical Results
The studies we describe in relation to unaccusatives offer conflicting perspectives on children’s ability to
represent A-movement. Snyder et al. (1994) argue that children can in fact represent A-movement, based
on their correct production of auxiliary selection with past participles; supporting this claim is data from
Snyder and Stromswold (1997), who present evidence that children use unaccusative verbs with preverbal
31
subjects in spontaneous speech. Babyonyshev et al. (2001), on the other hand, argue that children cannot
represent A-movement. Their data come from Russian-speaking children’s errors in applying the so-called
“genitive of negation.”
If children analyze unaccusatives in an adultlike way, data from spontaneous speech suggest that very
young children may have no difficulty with A-movement. Snyder and Stromswold (1997) used CHILDES
files to examine 12 English-speaking children’s spontaneous productions of the verbs break, come, fall, go,
grow, and leave, in unaccusative contexts. The authors report that children’s production of unaccusative
verbs begins around age 2;1 (range: 1;6–2;7), and that all the children acquired unaccusatives before passives
(with the gap ranging from 0–14 months, with a mean of 3.6 months, and a median of 2.7 months).
Further support for the claim that children can represent A-chains before age 4 comes from Snyder
et al. (1994), who investigated children’s application of the auxiliary selection rule in Italian and French. In
these Romance languages, past participles occur with auxiliary avoir/avere ‘have’ if they are transitive or
unergative (see (27), (28), and (29)) and with être/essere ‘be’ if the verb is unaccusative (26). Although
transitive verbs typically take have as their auxiliary, as in (28–29), when used as reflexives with an object
clitic, these verbs take the auxiliary be instead of have (30). After Marantz (1984), the reflexive clitic
construction is analyzed as involving an A-chain.
(26)
Jean est parti.
John is left
“John left.”
(27)
Jean a dormi.
John has slept
“John slept.”
(28)
Jean a mordu une fille.
John has bitten a girl
“John bit a girl.”
(29)
Jean l’a
mordu.
John her/him-has bitten
“John bit her/him.”
(30)
Jean s’est mordu.
John self-is bitten
“John bit himself.”
According to Snyder et al. (1994), children acquiring French and Italian make almost no errors on such
32
auxiliary selection.29 Snyder et al. examined the auxiliary selection by one French-speaking child and three
Italian-speaking children; Table 1 presents the results from Philippe (French, ages 2;1–3;3):
Table 1: Use of Aux Be vs. Have with Reflexive vs. Non-Reflexive Verbs (French; from Snyder et al., 1994)
reflexive
nonreflexive
be
27
0
have
2
104
Although the Italian-speaking children they studied had fewer utterances overall, these children showed
a similar facility correctly applying auxiliary selection with reflexive clitics in past participles. One of the
children made 3 errors overall, 2 in which she used have with an unaccusative verb that had no clitic (out of
61 such utterances), and 1 in which she used have with a reflexive that had an object clitic (out of 34 such
utterances). The other children made no errors.
Babyonyshev et al. (2001) present a different view of children’s acquisition of A-movement, by investigating the “genitive of negation” construction in Russian. Babyonyshev et al. point out that children’s
spontaneous production of both (short) passives and unaccusatives is not unambiguous evidence that children have A-chains. They instead argue that children represent these constructions as alternative structures
that involve no NP-movement, which they call S(yntactic)-homophones. In the case of passives, the child’s
S-homophone construction is actually a lexical or adjectival passive, as argued by Borer and Wexler (1987).
In the case of unaccusatives, Babyonyshev et al. suggest that children incorrectly represent these as unergative structures. Note that if children are representing unaccusatives incorrectly as unergatives, they are
representing a theme argument (an underlying object) in an external argument (subject) position. This
requires an assumption that children either violate, or do not have, Baker’s (1988) Uniformity of Theta
Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH), or any similar universal restriction on the assignment of thematic roles to
particular structural positions.
The genitive of negation is a Russian construction in which indefinite objects of transitive verbs or
(indefinite) internal arguments of unaccusative verbs are marked with genitive case instead of accusative
case, when in the scope of negation. Some examples from Babyonyshev et al. are given below:
(31)
Ja ne polucil pis’ma.
I not received letter-acc.pl
“I didn’t receive the/some letters.”
29 Randall
et al. (1994) also found accurate application of auxiliary selection in children acquiring German and Dutch.
33
(32)
Ja ne polucil (nikakix)
pisem.
I not received (neg-kind-gen.pl) letter-gen.pl
“I didn’t receive any letters.”
(33)
(Vragom)
ne bylo
vzjato
ni odnogo
goroda.
(enemy-instr.sg) not was-neu.sg taken-neu.sg neg single-gen.sg town-gen.sg
“Not a single town was taken (by the enemy).”
(34)
(Vragom)
ne byl
vsjat
gorod.
(enemy-instr.sg) not was-masc.sg taken-masc.sg town-nom.sg
“The town was not taken (by the enemy).”
(35)
Ne rasstajalo
ni odnoj
snezinki.
not melted-neu.sg neg single-gen.sg snowflake-gen.sg
“Not a single snowflake melted.”
(36)
Ne rasstajala
snezinka.
not melted-fem.sg snowflake-nom.sg
“The snowflake didn’t melt.”
(37)
Nikakie
devocki
ne tancevali.
neg-kind-nom.pl girl-nom.pl not danced-pl
“No girls/None of the girls danced.”
(38)
*Nikakix
devocek
ne tancevalo.
neg-kind-gen.pl girl-gen.pl not danced-neu.sg
“No girls danced.”
As illustrated in the examples, genitive marking is restricted to indefinite internal arguments within the
scope of negation (including internal arguments in passives); definite or specific objects are marked with
accusative case, and arguments of unergative verbs are marked with nominative. Babyonyshev et al. further
point out that this construction is, in many ways, ideal for investigating the claims of the A-chain maturation
hypothesis. One reason is that the internal argument of the unaccusative verb remains in the complement
of the verb on the surface. The A-movement of that argument to subject position is covert—it occurs after
Spell-Out.30 As a result, there is no S-homophone of this construction, so the A-chain maturation view
predicts that this construction will simply be problematic for children—there is no other way for children
to analyze the structure, if they cannot represent A-chains. The second reason this construction is useful is
that it is reportedly extremely frequent in adult speech (though Babyonyshev et al. do not provide frequency
data). Thus, if children do have difficulty with this construction, their difficulty cannot be explained by a
lack of exposure to the construction (as is sometimes argued for passive; see above).
30 For specific arguments for covert A-movement in this construction, see Babyonyshev et al. (2001); but also see Potsdam
and Polinsky (2011) for arguments against the covert movement analysis of this construction.
34
The authors predict that if Russian-speaking children have acquired the genitive of negation construction,
but cannot form A-chains, they will allow genitive case on the negated object of a transitive verb and disallow
genitive on subjects of unergative verbs, but—crucially—they will fail to allow genitive case on the argument
of a negated unaccusative verb.
Using a sentence-completion task, the experimenters presented Russian children (ages 3;0–6;6) with
brief stories involving a character who performed some action on various objects. After the story, a puppet
summarized what happened but left out the object, which the child was then prompted to provide. Multiple
object referents were provided in the story context in order to make indefinite reference pragmatically
felicitous. For example, in one story a cat has some houses and bicycles that he will paint. He paints two
houses but does not paint any bicycles. At the end the puppet says, “I know what happened. The cat
painted two houses and didn’t paint. . . ” The child should then complete the sentence with an expression
referring to the object. Since Russian allows variable word order, subjects of unergative verbs (as well as
objects of transitive verbs and arguments of unaccusative verbs) may occur postverbally.
The results of this study are reproduced in Table 2.
Table 2: Results of Babyonyshev et al. (2001)
Verb/Argument Type
nonspecific object of transitive
specific object of transitive
subject of unergative
argument of unaccusative
Percentage of Genitive Responses
73%
4%
0%
45%
The difference in the responses to unaccusatives vs. nonspecific object of transitives (73% vs. 45%)
was significant. The fact that children consistently marked the nonspecific object of transitive verbs with
genitive but never did so with subjects of unergatives (and virtually never with specific objects of transitives)
suggests that the children studied do know this construction and the semantic and syntactic constraints on its
application. Thus, the fact that the children failed to consistently mark the argument of unaccusative verbs
with genitive case is consistent with Babyonyshev et al.’s prediction, and their explanation that children
cannot represent A-chains. Instead, the authors conclude, children misrepresent unaccusatives as unergative
structures. Babyonyshev et al. note further that if their child subjects are divided into an older group (mean
age 5;4) and a younger group (mean age 4;0), the older children do mark the unaccusative arguments with
genitive more frequently than the younger children do.
We have seen three studies of children’s production of unaccusative structures with apparently conflicting
35
results. Snyder and Stromswold (1997) provide evidence from spontaneous speech indicating that Englishacquiring children have productive use of unaccusatives like break, come, and leave around age 2;1. Similarly,
Snyder et al. (1994) show that children acquiring French and Italian produce correct auxiliary selection,
indicating a correct analysis of verbs with reflexive clitics as unaccusatives; recall that the A-chain maturation
hypothesis predicts that these children should overgeneralize have as the auxiliary with these past participles.
On the other hand, Babyonyshev et al. (2001) show that Russian-speaking children fail to mark objects of
unaccusatives in the scope of negation with genitive case, as is required by the adult grammar. This suggests
that children incorrectly analyze these structures as unergative. How can these two sets of findings be
reconciled?31
Babyonyshev et al. suggest an alternative interpretation of the A-chain maturation account—which they
call the External Argument Requirement Hypothesis (EARH)—which would be consistent with both the
Russian data and the French/Italian data. According to the EARH, the problem with A-chains is not the
movement per se, but the absence of an external argument in the underlying form of passive and unaccusative
constructions. If children required there to be an external argument projected at all levels of representation,
they would misanalyze passive and unaccusative constructions as unergative structures.
The EARH is consistent with Snyder et al.’s findings because unlike other unaccusative constructions,
Romance reflexive clitic constructions do in fact project an external argument. The EARH is also consistent
with the Russian genitive of negation findings, since these constructions do not involve an external argument.
Therefore, if the problem for children lies in requiring an external argument to be projected, rather than
forming the A-chain itself, they should perform poorly on genitive of negation in Russian but well on auxiliary
selection with Romance reflexive clitics. However, if English-acquiring children actually do have an adultlike
unaccusative analysis of the verbs examined by Snyder and Stromswold, the EARH will not suffice to account
for the facts.
We should point out that Snyder and Stromswold (1997, p. 294, fn. 18) explicitly argue against the
hypothesis that children initially apply an unergative analysis to unaccusative verbs. They note that at least
in English, the primary linguistic input is unlikely to correct such a faulty analysis, and suggest that children
must exploit “the interaction of UG linking rules” and semantics to arrive at the correct unaccusative analysis.
The evidence from auxiliary selection in Snyder et al. (1994) also suggests that children are analyzing these
verbs in an adultlike way. Thus, the contrast between the Russian data and the English/Romance data may
31 It is worth noting that a similar disagreement arises in the case of Japanese: Machida et al. (2004) argue that children
acquiring Japanese perform well on unaccusatives (cf. Sano et al., 2001) because they incorrectly analyze them as unergatives.
Shimada and Sano (2007), in turn, argue that children do correctly distinguish unaccusative from unergative constructions in
Japanese, based on te-iru constructions.
36
be unresolved.
Regardless of the data on children’s acquisition of unaccusative verbs, we will see in the next section that
the EARH is not compatible with Hirsch and Wexler’s (2007) account of raising-to-subject constructions in
English. It is to these raising constructions that we now turn.
5
Raising-to-Subject
Constructions like that in (39a) are variably called raising-to-subject, (subject-to-)subject raising, or simply
raising constructions. Because these sentences alternate with “unraised” counterparts like (39b), even early
(pre-GB) analyses assumed that the NP John in (39a) is base-generated in the embedded clause, but “raises”
out of that clause to become the matrix subject at later stages in the derivation (Rosenbaum, 1967; Postal,
1974).
(39)
a. Johni seems/is likely [ti to be smart]
b. It seems/is likely that [John is smart]
Chomsky (1981) suggests that, due to a lexical idiosyncracy, predicates like seem and likely assign no
external θ-role to their subjects. As a result, given the strictures of the θ-Criterion, no NP will be generated
here at D-structure, and this subject position will be available as a landing site for movement.
All NPs require Case, and subject NPs usually get Case from tensed INFL/T in their clause. However,
if the embedded INFL is [–Tense] (i.e. infinitival T, as in (39a)), it will be unable to assign (nominative)
Case to its subject; in this situation, the subject NP in the embedded clause will be forced to raise to matrix
subject position for Case, thereby satisfying the Case filter (and, in a language like English, also checking
the matrix EPP feature). (In the unraised version, (39b), the embedded INFL is [+Tense]—finite—and thus
able to assign Case to the embedded subject. Under these circumstances, an expletive is inserted in matrix
subject position to check an EPP feature.)
It should be explicitly noted, however, that just as in other cases of A-movement (such as passives
and unaccusatives), the moved NP receives its θ-role in one position (its D-structure position, or—under
MP assumptions—its position at Merge), and moves to receive its Case feature in another position (its
S-structure, or Spell-Out, position).
37
5.1
Raising-to-Subject in Child Language: Empirical Results
Both Wexler (2004) and Hirsch and Wexler (2007) provide evidence that the raising-to-subject construction,
like that in (40), develops late—around age 7. They attribute this late development to the late biological
maturation of A-chains. On the other hand, Becker (2006, 2009) argues that children as young as age 4 can
correctly interpret raising constructions. We will examine each of these claims below.
(40)
Johni seems (to Mary) [ti to be smart]
Wexler (2004) reevaluated the A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH; Borer and Wexler, 1987, 1992) in
terms of phasal theory in Minimalism (Chomsky, 2001). Rather than defining the constraint on child grammar in terms of the grammaticality of forming an A-chain, the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) proposes
that in child grammar, v (the light verb) always defines a phase, regardless of whether v is “defective” or
not.
In Minimalism, phases are thought to be the smallest units of syntactic processing; they are “semantically
complete” units32 containing a verb, its arguments, and C “as the domain of force plus proposition” (Wexler,
2004, p. 164). Chomsky (2001) suggests that the derivation of any given expression proceeds phase by phase.
The idea here is that each phase is placed individually in active/working memory, where features are deleted
as necessary; afterwards, it is routed to the phonological component, where deleted features are removed
from the narrow syntax so the derivation can converge at LF. Importantly, though, once a phase has been
through the derivation cycle, no further changes can occur within the phase; only the “edges” of the phase
(usually specifiers) are available to other operations higher in the syntactic structure.33
Normal (nondefective) v assigns an external argument. In the case of a normal/nondefective v, the
complement to v (i.e. VP and its complements) is not visible to operations at the higher phase, which is
headed by C. This means that while the specifier of v may move up into the higher phase (as happens
to the subject, according to the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis), internal arguments of the verb cannot.
However, in the case of a defective v phase—that is, one in which no external argument is assigned—the
object (complement of V) is free to move up into the higher phase. Such is exactly the case with passive
and unaccusative verbs. Wexler argues that the same applies to constructions involving raising-to-subject
verbs, like seem.
32 Chomsky (2001) cites other evidence supporting the notion of derivation by phase, namely that phases are reconstruction
sites, and that they have some measure of phonetic independence.
33 Wexler (2004, p. 164) summarizes this Phase Impenetrability Condition in the following way: “When working at a phase,
only the edge (the head and spec(s)) of the next lower phase are available for analysis, and nothing lower than the edge. In
particular the complement isn’t available.”
38
According to UPR, however, children (unlike adults) take v to operate as the head of a phase regardless
of the type of verb involved (i.e. defective or not). The result is that internal arguments within the VP
complement of that v will never be available for movement into the higher phase. Thus, the UPR predicts
that children should be able to represent constructions with an expletive subject and a raising verb, as in
(41a), but should not be able to represent constructions in which the subject of the lower clause has raised
to the matrix clause, as in (41b).
(41)
a. It seems (to Lisa) that Bart is playing an instrument. (unraised)
b. Bart seems (to Lisa) to be playing an instrument. (raised)
Recall from the discussion above that the External Argument Requirement Hypothesis (EARH), which
Babyonyshev et al. (2001) invoke to reconcile their results with those of Snyder et al. (1994), predicts that
children should have difficulty with both constructions.
To evaluate children’s comprehension of these constructions, Hirsch and Wexler conducted a picture
selection task with children ages 3–9. Children were given sentences such as (41a) and (41b) above, plus the
two types of sentences in (42) and (43).
(42)
Homer is eating a sandwich. (active control)
(43)
Lisa thinks that Bart is playing an instrument. (‘think’)
In the cartoon pictures, thought bubbles were used to depict both “thinking” and “seeming.” The nonmatching picture in the think and seem conditions differed from the correct picture in one of a number of
ways:
• Matrix-reversal (MR) pictures depicted an incorrect character doing the “thinking.” For example, this
foil for sentence (43) above would show Bart both playing an instrument and thinking about Lisa.
• Embedded-reversal (ER) pictures depicted an incorrect character performing the action of the embedded predicate. This foil for (43) would show Lisa playing an instrument and thinking about Bart.
• Double-reversal (DR) pictures reversed the characters doing the thinking and the acting. This foil for
(43) would show Bart thinking about Lisa, and Lisa (in the thought bubble) playing an instrument.
Hirsch and Wexler report that while all children were at ceiling on the active control sentences like (42),
and performed very well on the think sentences (43) and unraised (41a) sentences, children younger than
39
age 7 were at chance on the raised sentences (41b). In fact, only the 9-year-olds scored above 90% for these
constructions. Hirsch and Wexler’s combined results are reproduced in Table 3.
Table 3: Results from Hirsch and Wexler (2007)
Age
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Total
Actives
100
99.2
99.2
99.2
100
99.2
100
99.5
Think
88.3
92.8
95.6
95.6
96.1
98.3
100
95.2
Unraised
85.6
88.9
92.8
91.7
96.7
98.9
98.9
93.3
Raised
43.9
45.6
44.4
51.7
71.1
75.6
92.2
60.6
Breaking down children’s errors according to foil type, Hirsch and Wexler found that with the think
and unraised seem items, children had the hardest time rejecting matrix-reversal (MR) foils (those in which
the agent of the embedded clause is also—incorrectly—represented as the agent/experiencer of the matrix
clause). It was mainly the youngest children who had this difficulty, and the authors suggest that an
undeveloped Theory of Mind, or a failure to understand the lexical meaning of the verbs think or seem, may
play a role in these errors.
For the raised seem items, however, children showed a different error pattern. With these items, children
made the most errors with double-reversal (DR) foils: they chose the picture in which the experiencer of
the matrix clause was performing the embedded clause action, and the agent of the embedded clause was
doing the thinking. In the DR conditions, children are not just at chance; rather, they are significantly below
chance, suggesting a strong preference for the DR foil over the correct picture. (With the other foil types,
children are not below chance.)
Hirsch and Wexler interpret this result as meaning that because children’s grammar cannot represent
a raising structure, children interpret raised seem sentences as if they were think sentences. That is, they
interpret a sentence like (41b) above, repeated here as (44a), as if it meant (44b).
(44)
a. Bart seems to Lisa to be playing an instrument.
b. Bart thinks Lisa is playing an instrument.
40
Becker’s (2006; 2009) experimental work suggests a somewhat different picture of children’s facility
with raising constructions.34 In Becker (2006), 3- to 5-year-old children were shown a cartoon picture that
depicted characters and normal inanimate objects (i.e. inanimate objects were not made “more animate” by
adding eyes, etc.), and a puppet uttered a description of the picture. The child’s task was to say whether the
puppet’s sentence was “OK” or “silly” with respect to the picture. The puppet’s sentences were constructed
to contain an inanimate subject, either a raising or a control verb (seem, appear, want, try), and an embedded
predicate that was either semantically compatible or incompatible with the matrix subject. (See Table 4 for
examples.)
This design was driven by the fact that control verbs select for animate subjects while raising verbs do
not project any subjects; therefore, raising verbs, but not control verbs, are free to occur with an inanimate
matrix subject. For both classes of verbs, however, the matrix subject is semantically linked to the embedded
predicate, and therefore this predicate must be semantically compatible with the matrix subject. The
prediction was that if children distinguish the classes of raising and control verbs correctly, they should
reject all sentences containing a control verb since there is a semantic clash between the control verb and
the inanimate matrix subject; conversely, children should accept the sentences containing raising verbs, as
long as the embedded predicate was semantically compatible with the matrix subject. If children do not
distinguish the verb classes and interpret all verbs as control verbs, they should reject all items; if they
interpret all verbs as raising verbs, they should accept sentences with a compatible lower predicate and
reject sentences with an incompatible lower predicate. Example items and their types are given in Table 4.
Table 4: Test Items in Becker (2006) Experiment
Item
Type
The flower wants to be pink
control/compatible*
The flower wants to fly away
control/incompatible**
The hay seems to be on the ground raising/compatible
The hay seems to be excited
raising/incompatible
*compatible = subject and lower predicate are semantically compatible
**incompatible = subject and lower predicate are semantically incompatible
The older and younger children in the study behaved differently. Five-year-olds consistently rejected
sentences containing a control verb, and accepted only those raising sentences that contained a compatible
lower predicate, indicating an adultlike distinction between the two verb classes. The 3-year-olds, however,
34 It is worth noting that Becker sought to answer a different type of question than Hirsch and Wexler. Whereas Hirsch and
Wexler were asking whether children could represent A-chains, so as to interpret constructions involving that operation, Becker
was interested in how children come to distinguish the class of raising verbs from the class of control verbs. These two classes
of verbs differ in their thematic structure, yet they overlap partially in their surface distribution. This was the primary point
of interest in Becker’s research.
41
did not appear to discriminate the two verb classes. In both cases, they accepted or rejected the sentence
on the basis of the compatibility of the embedded predicate. Thus, these children accepted sentences such
as The flower wants to be pink/The hay seems to be on the ground since flowers can be pink and hay can
be on the ground, but they rejected The flower wants to fly away/The hay seems to be excited since flowers
cannot fly away and hay cannot be excited. Four-year-olds showed an intermediate performance between
the younger and older children.
Becker’s interpretation of these results is that younger children correctly interpret raising structures
as involving a semantic relationship between the matrix subject and embedded predicate, but not between
the matrix subject and matrix verb; however, they make the error of allowing control verbs to have this
same type of interpretation. A follow-up experiment showed that when children are given raising or control
sentences with an animate subject, they correctly interpret both types of verbs. In later work, Becker (2009)
argues explicitly that it is the animacy of the matrix subject that drives children’s interpretation of the
sentence as involving a raising (A-movement) or control structure.
The results of this study leave open the possibility that the younger children do analyze control verbs as
selecting the matrix subject, but they do not yet place a semantic restriction on that subject requiring it to
be animate. In Becker (2009), children’s comprehension of raising and control verbs with expletive subjects
(weather it) was tested. Expletive subjects differ from inanimate referential subjects in that they do not
refer to anything. Therefore, they can occur only with predicates that do not assign a θ-role to that position
(in this case, subject position). That is, a sentence like (45) must involve a raising predicate.
(45)
It gorps to be raining.
Three- and four-year-old children were shown pictures of weather events, and a puppet commented
about each picture using either a raising or a control verb. The child was asked to say whether the puppet’s
sentence was “OK” or “silly.” Example prompts are given in (46)–(??).
(46)
It seems to be snowing. (raising)
(47)
It’s trying to be sunny. (control)35
The mean percentage of “OK” responses is given in Table 5.
35 The use of the progressive or plain present tense is determined by whether the verb itself is eventive (must be progressive)
or stative (must not be progressive) and is unrelated to whether the verb is a raising or a control verb.
42
Table 5: Responses in Becker (2009) Experiment: Percent Judged OK
Verb type
raising
control
3-year-olds
83.0
66.7
4-year-olds
91.7
68.1
Both age groups were significantly above chance in accepting the raising weather sentences like (46a),
suggesting an adultlike interpretation of these sentences. In their responses to the control weather sentences
like (46b), 3-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, were significantly above chance in their OK responses, suggesting
that on average, they considered control verbs to be compatible with an expletive subject. Moreover, 4-yearolds, but not 3-year-olds, showed a significant difference between their proportion of OK responses to raising
vs. control items, suggesting that 4-year-olds are beginning to distinguish these two verb classes.
Let us now consider how the differing claims of Hirsch and Wexler (2007) and Becker (2006, 2009) might
be reconciled. Hirsch and Wexler point out that children in the Becker (2006) study may have performed
as they did because they do not yet have an adultlike concept of animacy, such that they allow inanimate
objects to want or try to do things. Although Becker (2009) provides arguments against this possibility, young
children’s conception of the world—and the effect this might have on their interpretations of sentences—is
important to consider. It is possible that children’s grammaticality judgments are influenced by alternative
ontological possibilities, and accordingly that they respond to these tasks differently than adults would.
On the other hand, there are various methodological differences between the Hirsch and Wexler (2007)
and Becker (2006) studies that could account for their different results. Hirsch and Wexler employed raising
sentences that contained an overt experiencer argument (to Lisa in Bart seems to Lisa to be playing an
instrument), while Becker’s test sentences lacked this phrase. Although Hirsch and Wexler argue that the
inclusion of the experiencer argument does not make the sentence harder to parse (based on processing data
from adults), it is possible that this phrase, when overt, does make the processing load high enough for
children that they cannot correctly parse the sentence. To our knowledge, this has not been tested within
a single experiment, though we do know that increasing the number of animate NP referents in a sentence
may significantly increase the processing load (Goodluck and Tavakolian, 1982).
Another way to interpret Hirsch and Wexler’s results is to consider the relative ordering of thematic
roles in a raising sentence with an overt experiencer argument:
(48)
Bart
seems to Lisa
to be playing an instrument
Theme verb Experiencer Predicate
43
While it is not problematic, in principle, to have a Theme subject (as is the case in a regular unaccusative
sentence, like The rock fell), when more than one argument is present, the Thematic Hierarchy requires the
argument higher on the hierarchy (in (48), the experiencer) to appear in subject position (Jackendoff, 1972).
However, in (48) it is the argument that is lower on the Thematic Hierarchy (the theme) that is in subject
position. Along the lines of the claims made by Hyams et al. (2006; see discussion in section 3.4 above), it
may be that when the canonical ordering of arguments is disrupted, the sentence becomes difficult, if not
impossible, for young children to parse. These possibilities must be explored in future research.
6
Raising-to-Object
Like raising-to-subject constructions, raising-to-object (R-to-O) constructions are also biclausal. However,
the latter constructions have an overt embedded subject that is distinct from the matrix subject.
(49)
John expects/believes Mary to read the paper regularly.
Whereas the raising analysis for subject raising constructions like (39a) has been fairly uncontroversial,
two major approaches to what we will call R-to-O constructions have appeared in the literature, only one of
which actually involves movement (for a more detailed discussion, see Kirby et al., 2010, and the references
therein).
The R-to-O analysis (Postal, 1974; and more recently, Lasnik and Saito, 1991) parallels the subject raising
account detailed in section 5 above; if the embedded clause is untensed, it will not be able to assign nominative
Case, and so the embedded subject (in (49), Mary) will have to move to avoid violating the Case Filter.
Because the matrix verb assigns no θ-role to its complement (i.e. in (49), there is no “expectee/believee”),
matrix object position is available as a landing site (in accordance with the θ-Criterion), resulting in a
structure like that in (50).
(50)
John expects/believes Maryi [ti to read the paper regularly].
In later GB models, as well as some more current MP models, “object” position is SpecAgrO P, where
Case features are assigned (or checked) for objects (51). Linear order is achieved by the matrix verb raising
to a functional head above this projection—possibly TP or vP—and the matrix subject raising out of its
base-generated, VP-internal position and up to SpecAgrS P, also for Case reasons.
44
(51)
Agrs P
Agrs 0
DP
Johni
Agrs
TP
T0
Agro P
T
V
T
expectsj
-past
Agro 0
DP
Maryk
Agro
VP
V0
DP
ti
V
Agrs P
tj
DP
T0
tk
to read. . .
That the embedded subject indeed receives accusative (i.e. object) Case becomes obvious when a pronoun
occurs in this position (52). As a result, proponents of this approach sometimes call this construction subjectto-object raising, for obvious reasons.
(52)
John expects heri /*shei [ti to read the paper regularly].
Anaphors may appear as the embedded subject of in such constructions, and a pronominal embedded
subject may not be coindexed with the matrix subject (53). Given Principles A and B, this fact is taken
by proponents of the raising analysis to indicate that the embedded subject does indeed move to the matrix
clause. (In (53), subscripts represent binding indices, rather than co-indexation based on movement).
(53)
Johni expects himselfi /*himi /*hei to be a discriminating reader.
45
Likewise, the fact that matrix material can appear between the embedded subject and its predicate, as
in (54), has also been used to support the raising analysis. (See Lasnik and Saito, 1991, for details on these
and other arguments in favor of a raising analysis.)
(54)
John expects Mary wholeheartedly to be a discriminating reader.
However, an alternative approach to such “raising-to-object” constructions instead suggests that no
movement whatsoever is involved. Chomsky (1981) argues for an “exceptional case-marking” (ECM) account,
on the basis of his assumption that all subcategorized positions (including objects) are θ-marked. Given the
θ-Criterion and the projection principle, θ-marking of verbal complements effectively precludes any NP
moving into object position, even if that position is not filled at D-structure. In short, movement into
θ-positions is impossible, and the NP subjects of infinitival complements must receive their Case through
other means.
This ECM account (Chomsky, 1981, 1986; Chomsky and Lasnik, 1993) suggests that structures like (49)
arise through the application of a marked rule of S0 (CP)-deletion, governed by certain verbs like expect and
believe (55a–55b). Here, the embedded subject remains in situ and is “exceptionally case-marked” as an
object by the matrix verb (exceptionally, since Case-marking does not usually take place across a clausal
boundary). While we will use the term “raising-to-object” to describe these constructions, see Kirby (2009)
for some evidence—from patterns in child language—which suggests that something like the ECM analysis
may instead be correct.
(55)
a. John expects/believes [S 0 [S Mary/her/himself to read the paper regularly]].
b. John expects/believes [S Mary/her/himself to read the paper regularly].
Regardless of the details of the particular syntactic account, several patterns appear in the behavior of
R-to-O verbs which should be noted explicitly here, and all of which stem from the lack of θ-assignment
between the matrix verb and the embedded subject NP. First, R-to-O utterances with embedded active
clauses are synonymous with similar utterances with embedded passive clauses (i.e. (56a) = (56b)).
(56)
a. John expects/believes Mary to call Bill regularly.
b. John expects/believes Bill to be called by Mary regularly.
Next, because R-to-O verbs assign no θ-role to the matrix object position (i.e. the overt subject of the
embedded clause), it is grammatical for an expletive subject to appear in this position.
46
(57)
John expects there to be a lot of people at the party.
(58)
John believes it to be rainy in Vancouver.
And finally, because R-to-O verbs place no semantic selectional restrictions (including animacy) on the
subject of the embedded clause, these verbs may embed any clause that is itself internally semantically
felicitous.
(59)
John expects the book to be interesting.
(60)
John believes bubble gum to be unhealthy.36
6.1
Raising-to-Object/Exceptional Case Marking in Child Language: Empirical
Results
Almost no research in child language has focused on the raising-to-object (R-to-O) construction. A study
by Goro (2004) using spontaneous speech in CHILDES (data from Adam, Sarah, and Abe) turned up no
spontaneous productions of R-to-O constructions of the type presented above. Kirby’s (2009) work covered
a wider range of spontaneous data and included experimental work. We describe this work here.
Kirby’s examination of spontaneous speech included all American English corpora available in the
CHILDES database, and looked at both adult and child utterances. All instances of the R-to-O verbs
want and need were searched, and then examined by hand so that only those instances occurring in actual
R-to-O contexts were included. In children’s speech, 689 R-to-O occurrences of want and 19 R-to-O occurrences of need were found. These constructions included a variety of syntactic features, and to a large
extent, children’s R-to-O constructions resembled those spoken by caregivers, with some minor exceptions.
For example:
• The majority of R-to-O utterances are in present tense (90–100% for children and adults).
• The majority of R-to-O utterances contain a pronoun subject in the matrix clause.
• For want utterances, about 15–20% contain matrix negation; for need, this number is around 40%.
36 Instead of CP complements, expect/believe may instead take NP complements, as in the sentences John has been expecting
a delivery or John believes the story. In these cases, expect/believe clearly must assign a θ-role to the following NP, as there is
no other verb which might do this work.
However, the existence of such sentences should not be taken as evidence that the these verbs always θ-mark a following NP.
The fact that R-to-O verbs may either take a NP complement (and assign it a θ-role) or a CP complement (in which case there
is no θ-relation between the matrix verb and the embedded subject) should be no more controversial than claiming that verbs
like eat or sing can be optionally transitive (Julia has already eaten (dinner); Marguerite sings (opera) beautifully).
47
• 1% of adults’ want constructions, and 1.6% of children’s, contain an embedded passive (e.g. I didn’t
want my hand to be holded; Abe, 2;11).
• Children produced a small number of embedded expletives (0.4% of want constructions; e.g. I want it
to be warm; Nina 3;2.4).
• Adults produce more questions than children (71.4% of their want-utterances, vs. 27.7% for children).
Thus, there is some productive use of R-to-O constructions in these data. It is important to remember,
however, that these data come from a large number of children (over 50) and that the search spanned a
wide range of ages (from the youngest files available, through late childhood37 ). Nevertheless, many of these
utterances, including ones with embedded passives, come from quite young ages: the earliest is from Abe,
at age 2;11.30.
In addition to examining spontaneous productions of R-to-O, Kirby also conducted a number of comprehension studies with children ages 4 and 5 years. In all of Kirby’s experiments, she compared children’s
performance on R-to-O constructions with object control (John asked/told Mary to wash the car). Here,
however, we will focus only on the R-to-O results.
The first experiment tested active R-to-O constructions using a Truth-Value Judgment (TVJ) task.
Children were read a brief story; then the experimenter posed a question about the story to a puppet, and
the puppet answered.
(61)
Example story:
One day, the nurse and the policeman were talking when the policeman’s dog started barking.
The nurse said to the policeman, “Your dog is making too much noise! You should make him
stop.” But the policeman said, “No, I’m going to let him keep barking.”
Experimenter: What did the nurse do?
Puppet: She wanted the policeman to stop the dog (T)
Children heard either 3 items with want (2 of which had target-true answers, 1 of which had a targettrue answer) or 3 items with need (1 target-true and 2 target-false answers). This experiment was included
for several reasons: (1) to check whether children are familiar with the lexical meanings of the verbs want
and need, (2) to see if 4- and 5-year-olds know the basic argument structure of R-to-O verbs (e.g. where in
37 All available CHILDES files were included in the search. These files represent children spanning from around 1 year old to
13 years and older.
48
the sentence the wanter/needer must appear), and (3) to check whether children have the processing ability
required to parse biclausal sentences with 3 animate NPs.
Children in both age groups were significantly above chance in responding correctly to these items
(4-year-olds: 87.5%; 5-year-olds: 91.2%).
Another experiment tested children’s comprehension of embedded passives. As noted above in section 6,
one of the properties of the R-to-O construction is that an embedded passive is truth-functionally equivalent
to its embedded active counterpart.
(62)
a. John wanted Mary to wash the car.
b. John wanted the car to be washed by Mary.
As in the first experiment, this was tested by giving children a brief story and then having them rate
the truth value of the puppet’s comment about what happened in the story.
(63)
Example story:
Kermit said to Shrek, “I was supposed to make dinner for Clifford, since he can’t make it for
himself, but I’m too tired. I need some help. Can you make dinner for him?” Shrek said, “Sure,
I can do that,” and went and made dinner for Clifford.
Experimenter: What did Dora do?
Puppet: She needed Clifford to be fed by Shrek (T)
Again, children heard either 3 items with want or 3 items with need. Each set of test items had 2
target-true answers and 1 target-false answer.
Although their performance was not at ceiling, both 4- and 5-year-olds were still significantly above
chance in correctly responding to these items (4-year-olds: 75%; 5-year-olds: 79.2%). Interestingly, these
same children were tested on matrix passives, and although the 5-year-olds gave the same performance (also
79.2% correct, significantly better than chance), the 4-year-olds were not significantly better than chance on
the matrix passives (64.6% correct). Thus, in this experiment, the 4-year-old children performed better on
passives embedded under R-to-O verbs than they did on matrix passive constructions.38
38 There are two ways in which this comparison may not be a fair one. First, in the matrix passive test, children heard 3
items: 1 with target-true and 2 with target-false answers. This item set is not an ideal match for the embedded passive task
(which had 1 target-false and 2 target-true items), as it is widely accepted that children have a “yes”-bias, and may perform
more poorly on target-false than on target-true answers.
And second, both matrix passive items with target-false answers had agent-subjects and patient-objects (just like in active
49
Kirby notes that this asymmetry in performance calls into question the A-chain maturation hypothesis.
Not only do active R-to-O constructions contain a nontrivial A-chain (from the subject of the embedded
clause to the object of the matrix clause) but R-to-O constructions with an embedded passive contain
two A-chains: one within the embedded clause (passivization), and a second one raising the NP into the
matrix clause (raising-to-object). If children perform better on constructions involving two A-chains than
constructions involving one A-chain, it is unlikely that their difficulty with matrix passives has to do with
A-chain formation per se.
Kirby suggests two distinct (but related) viewpoints which may account for children’s relatively high
performance on R-to-O embedded passive constructions. First, Kirby notes that Hyams et al.’s (2006)
account of children’s late acquisition of the passive relies crucially on a default alignment of semantic and
grammatical roles. Hyams et al. suggest that children only have difficulty with A-chains when these obscure
the canonical pairing of agent with subject, patient with object. Kirby suggests that due to the double
A-chains in R-to-O utterances, semantic objects (which receive their θ-role in the embedded clause) surface
as syntactic objects (in the matrix clause), and that it may be precisely this alignment which supports
children’s interpretation of R-to-O embedded passives. Kirby suggests that the CAH is a piece of what she
calls “semantic scaffolding”: a strategy which children use at early (non-adultlike) stages of grammatical
knowledge, in which they take recourse to canonical semantics, in a number of ways, to support their syntactic
interpretations.
Second, Kirby argues that reconceiving biclausal constructions in terms of phases may provide a way to
understand children’s facility with R-to-O. Specifically, because there is no θ-assignment between the matrix
verb and the subject of the embedded clause, R-to-O utterances may allow for discrete phasal processing.
This would allow children to parse the matrix frame (e.g. John wanted X) before parsing the embedded clause
(X = Mary to call Bill), in turn lowering the processing resources required to understand such utterances,
and leading to an early facility with R-to-O utterances (active or passive).39
Kirby also directly tested children’s knowledge of the lack of θ-marking between matrix R-to-O verbs
sentences); if children interpret passives as actives, they should accept these sentences. In contrast, only one of the target-false
R-to-O embedded passives had a similar (i.e. active-like) θ-role alignment; the other was false for basic truth-value reasons,
given the preceding story.
Ideally, the R-to-O embedded passive and matrix passive items would have equal numbers of target-true and target-false
answers (both within and across tasks), and all the R-to-O items would be specifically crafted to check whether children
interpret embedded passives as active clauses. Kirby (2011) reports that a follow-up study is in progress which makes both of
these changes.
39 This would contrast notably with object control (OC) utterances, in which the embedded clause must be interpreted with
respect to the matrix object.
(i) John asked/told Mary [Mary to call Bill].
Thus, although R-to-O and OC utterances have a similar surface string, R-to-O utterances may correspond to a lower
processing load.
50
and their embedded subjects, by eliciting semantic anomaly and grammaticality judgments from the same
children. These judgments tested whether children would accept inanimate (64) and expletive (65) subjects
embedded under R-to-O verbs. Children were shown pictures and heard a puppet make a comment about
each picture. The child’s task was to say whether what the puppet said was “okay” or “silly,” compared to
“what we normally say.”40
(64)
The boy wanted the cake to be chocolate.
(65)
The woman needed it to be cooler in the car.
Results indicated that neither age group was significantly above chance on correctly accepting embedded
inanimate subjects (4-year-olds: 56.3%; 5-year-olds: 58.3%), and that only 5-year-olds were above chance on
correctly accepting embedded expletives (4s: 62.5%; 5s: 77.1%). However, based on children’s justifications
for their rejections, Kirby concluded that children were attending to truth values (rather than grammaticality
or felicity), and not parsing the R-to-O utterances as a whole, but rather selectively attending to the
embedded clause.41 She suggests that the demands of the task may have overloaded children’s processing
abilities, resulting in this effect.
Further research on children’s acquisition of R-to-O is clearly necessary, to determine at what point
children have the full adultlike representation of these utterances.
7
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have discussed children’s acquisition of A-movement in its major forms, including passives,
unaccusatives, and raising verbs (both subject raising and raising-to-object).
Children’s acquisition of these constructions seems to be staggered, with some constructions (e.g. unaccusatives) appearing quite early in spontaneous production (around 2;0) and other constructions (passives,
R-to-O utterances) appearing much later. But even given a single construction—for instance, the passive—
children may display varying levels of “adultlike” performance, depending on the semantics of the utterance
in question, the particular thematic roles assigned (and the positions to which they are assigned), the pragmatic felicity of the utterance context, and the processing load associated with the comprehension task
40 In Kirby’s experiment, these grammatical R-to-O sentences were contrasted with anomalous/ungrammatical foils containing
object control verbs, e.g. #The girl asked the trees to be tall, *The woman told there to be flowers on the table.
41 For instance, one child rejected the sentence The teacher needed the books to weigh less because “they’re so heavy” (MB,
4;1.15). Another child rejected Big Bird wanted there to be crayons in the box, saying “It’s silly because there’s no crayons”
(MC, 4;2.16). Kirby argues that such justifications indicate that children are not parsing the matrix frame, which can change
the truth-value of the overall sentence.
51
(including sentence-internal factors, such as the number of animate NPs, and sentence-external factors, like
the experimental method).
In short, researchers have determined that all of these issues are at play in children’s performance. When
these factors are stacked in children’s favor, children may show comprehension at much earlier ages than the
literature has previously claimed—even if they do not yet use the constructions in their spontaneous speech.
As a result, one of the major historical debates about the acquisition of A-movement—namely, whether
A-chains are subject to biological maturation—seems unlikely to hold up to any scrutiny.
There is still some debate over whether children assign adultlike analyses (and specifically, ones that
contain A-chains) to all these constructions from the earliest stages, but some of the evidence suggests that
they do. As we find more sensitive metrics to test children’s underlying representations of these constructions,
it is conceivable that researchers could determine A-movement to be something made immediately available
by UG. In short, it may ultimately prove less helpful for researchers to talk about the “acquisition of Amovement,” and more helpful to focus on the surrounding linguistic and extra-linguistic limitations that
prevent children from demonstrating what they have known all along.
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