Possessor Extraction in Child English: A Minimalist Account
Elena Gavruseva, Rosalind Thorton · Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) · 1999
This paper reports the results of an experimental study that investigated how young English-speaking children acquire questions with wh-possessive phrases such as 'whose hat'.It has been noted since Ross (1967) that adult English patterns with other Germanic languages in enforcing obligatory piedpiping of whose-phrases, as shown in ( 1): (1) a. Whose hat did he take?b. *Whose did he take hat? c. *Who did he take 's hat?The examples in (1) show that neither extraction of the genitive whpossessor 'whose', nor extraction of the bare wh-possessor 'who' is allowed. 1 By contrast, in languages like Hungarian, Tzotzil, and Russian, whpossessors are free to optionally extract out of NP.Consider a representative example from Hungarian that illustrates optional extraction of the whpossessor NP in dative case (the data are from Szabolcsi 1994): (2) Ki-nek k ismer-té-tek [ DP t k a vendég-é-ø-t]]]?Who-Dat know-past.2plthe guest -poss.3sg.Acc 'Whose guest did you know?' The work of Chung (1991) on Chamorro appears to suggest that there is a third alternative to pied-piping, namely, obligatory extraction of whpossessors, as illustrated in (3): (3) Hayi k un-yuland [ DP munika-ña t k ]? Who Infl(2c)-break doll-Agr(3sg) 'Whose doll did you break?' 1 Ross (1967) labeled the ungrammatical examples in 1(b,c) as 'left-branch violations'.In this paper, we will use the term 'possessor extraction' to avoid a language-specific bias in terminology, since crosslinguistically wh-possessors may occupy a left or a right branch of the Spec of NP.