VP-Ellipsis and Anaphora in Child Language Acquisition
Ayumi Matsuo, Nigel Duffield · Language Acquisition · 2001
In this article, we report on experiments investigating children's knowledge of the constraints on ellipsis constructions in English, focusing on subtle contrasts between verb phrase-ellipsis (VPE) and VP-anaphora (VPA). These contrasts are of theoretical interest insofar as they present an apparent learnability paradox: On one hand, the negative constraints on these constructions are underdetermined by the positive evidence available to the learner (Crain (1991)); on the other hand, languages systematically vary in the availability of VPE. Hence, it seems as if the constraints cannot be directly encoded in Universal Grammar. Our results-from 2 parallel experiments employing the same stimuli but with different methodologies-show that young children can correctly distinguish VPE from VPA, respecting the constraints on each.