The interaction between question formation and verbal morphology in the acquisition of Hebrew

1. The interaction between question formation and verbal morphology in the acquisition of Hebrew Sharon Armon-Lotem Bar Ilan University IASCL , Berlin July 25-29, 2005

2. Three factors in the growth of language • Genetic endowment • Experience  variation • Principles not specific to the faculty of language: • “Principles of data analysis that might be used in language acquisition …” • “Principles of structural architecture and development constraints … including principles of efficient computation” (Chomsky 2005, p. 6)

3. Objectives Discuss the limits of “principles not specific to the faculty of language” and of experience in accounting for the interaction between question formation and verbal morphology in the acquisition of Hebrew.

4. Outline • The acquisition of inflections in Hebrew • Saliency and frequency in the input • Propose a minimalist account • The acquisition of questions in Hebrew • Saliency and frequency in the input • Propose a minimalist account

5. Berman Longitudinal, CHILDES Table 1Size andRange ofDatabase from Four Hebrew-speaking Children

6. Hebrew Verbal System • Five derivational conjugations (binyanim). • No morphological/ grammatical manifestation of aspect • 3 tenses: past, present, future • Present tense: agreement in gender and number • Past & Future tenses: agreement in person, gender and number

7. Hebrew Verbal System k.t.v - write Past Present

8. Order of acquisition of verbal morphology in Hebrew (Armon-Lotem 1997) • Early verb usage - aspectually limited • Subject-verb agreement in gender • An explosion of past and present forms. • First and second person. Age of Acquisition of Agreement and Tense / Mood Inflections Leor Gender & Lior Number Tense / Mood Smadar Person 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Months

9. Saliency and Frequency • Lexical aspect is part of the meaning of verbs. • Hebrew is a gender oriented language: • All nouns are lexically (and morphologically) categorized for gender • Verbs, adjectives and preposition are inflected for gender. • Verbal morphology is intertwined with the root consonants marking both tensed and non-tensed forms. • Person is only a property of past (and future) tense, and cannot be acquired before tenses are.

10. The Use of Subjects in Hebrew (Berman 1990) • Bare Nouns, Proper names, Ze ‘this/it’. a. xatul nafal 'cat fell,' Hagar tesaper 'Hagar will tell’ [Hagar 1;7] b. ze anan 'it (is a) cloud' [Smadar 1;6]. • Pronoun subjects alternating with subjectless utterances with inflected verbs (usually ungrammatical present tense verbs which does not allow null-subject in Hebrew). a. hi shota mic 'she drinks juice' b.*holex ba-na'alayim shel doda Ogi 'walks in-the-shoes of Aunt Orly' [Leor 1;11].

11. Using subjects - Saliency and Frequency • Overt bare subjects are more frequent, particularly in child directed language: Mom: One for Mommy, one for Baby. • Pronouns are cognitively more complex being deictic in space • Pronouns are regularly omitted in Hebrew

12. Interlacing Subject Use and Verbal Morphology (Armon-Lotem, 1999) • Bare subjects are used after aspect, but before gender and number agreement. • Pronouns are used after tense but before person agreement. => agreement mismatches a. Hagar *(na)fal Hagar (fm.) fell (ms.) [Hagar 1;7] b. ani *halax I-1st went-3rd [Asaf 1;11] Can principles not specific to the faculty of language account for these facts?

13. Working Assumptions (1) • An economy driven “no agreement nodes hypothesis” (Speas 1994, Chomsky 1995). • By locality principles, heads (and complements) are obligatory while specifiers are optional (Chomsky 1995). • Children, being “minimalists”, construct the smallest convergent trees that their grammar allows (Weissenborn 1993).  Children are economical, employing the smallest possible numeration with the least syntactic operations (Merge, Agree, Edge)

14. The “minimalist” child (1) • No Agr nodes => Asp is marked with gender and number uninterpretable features and T is marked with person uninterpretable features. • Children first-Merge the semantically motivated head Asp, with its complement (VP). The optional specifier is computed by later-Merge. By Agree Aspect checks for gender and number. • When the semantically motivated functional head T is acquired, agreement in person is achieved in the same manner.

15. Intermediate Summary (1) • The acquisition of Hebrew verbal morphology reflects a bottom-up construction of the adult tree (Armon-Lotem 1997), where aspect is acquired before tense, and gender and number before person. • At the respective points of acquisition, being the highest functional categories in the emerging phrase-marker, AspP and TP function as phases. • Children errors reflect children opting for the smallest possible numeration with the least syntactic operations, even if deviating from the input. • After later-Merge applies, children seem to find it enough to apply Agree to the uninterpretable features of the DP, which is within the MinD of the head, in a way which reminds of Wexler’s dual checking mechanism.

16. How does the acquisition of questions fit in?

17. Question formation in Hebrew and its acquisition • Questions formation in Hebrew, an SVO language, involves wh-movement, but no verb or auxiliary movement. • Children seem to be using the adult structure from the onset of question formation. • Eyal (1974) - child use of questions differs from the adult use in the semantic complexity. • Dromi & Berman (1986) - child use of questions differs from the adult use in the degree to which verbs are used in the questions. • Uziel-Karl (2005) – children move from using frozen, sometimes verbless questions to using a wider variety of wh-words with a variety of inflected verbs. This corresponds to changes in the adult input.

18. Phases in the acquisition of questions (Armon-Lotem 1997) • Rote learnt and verbless questions

19. a. ma asit? [Lior1;09;25] what you-did 'what have you done?' (limited to dirtying her pants) b. ma kara? [Lior 1;09;16] ‘what happened?’

20. Phases in the acquisition of questions (Armon-Lotem 1997) • Rote learnt and verbless questions • Questions with verbs, which are inflected for gender and number.

21. lama ata boxe? [Lior 1;11;00] why you-sg-ms cry-sg-ms 'Why are you crying?‘

22. Phases in the acquisition of questions (Armon-Lotem 1997) • Rote learnt and verbless questions • Questions with verbs, which are inflected for gender and number. • Full range of verbal inflections with questions, while personal pronouns, which are optional, are never used in subject position.

23. a. ma asiti, aba? [Lior 2;01;18] what I-did Daddy 'what have I done, Daddy?' b. ma samti? [Lior 2;01;18] what I-put 'What did I put?'

24. Phases in the acquisition of questions (Armon-Lotem 1997) • Rote learnt and verbless questions • Questions with verbs, which are inflected for gender and number. • Full range of verbal inflections with questions, while personal pronouns, which are optional, are never used in subject position. • Fully adultlike (including negation, etc.)

25. Phases in the use of questions and inflections

26. Intermediate Summary (2) • The acquisition of Hebrew verbal morphology reflects a bottom-up construction of the adult tree (Armon-Lotem 1997) • The same order of acquisition is found in both declarative and interrogative sentences, but the use of verbal morphology in interrogatives seems to lag behind its use in declaratives.

27. Saliency and frequency • While the general order of acquisition of question can be derived from input frequencies, the gradual acquisition of inflections in interrogatives and the seeming delay are more challenging for such “principles not specific to the faculty of language”. • Is it again a case of opting for the smallest possible numeration with the least syntactic operations, even if deviating from the input?

28. Working Assumptions (2) “For Ā-movement it is unclear whether there is independent motivation for the features that would be required to formulate the operation ... It may be that phase heads have an edge feature …This edge feature permits raising to the phase edge without feature matching” Chomsky (2005, p.18-19)

29. The “minimalist” child (2) • AspP and TP show phase-like behavior permitting raising of the wh-word to the phase edge without feature matching. • This makes it possible for each new functional head to initially alternate between Agreeing with Φ-features and permitting a Wh-word. • Here again, children opt for the smallest possible numeration with the least syntactic operations.

30. Summary • The delay in the use of inflections in interrogatives suggests that as children construct the phrase marker of their language, each new functional node initially serves as a Phase. • This continues until they learn that Agree must apply to all the Φ-features in the Phase. It is only at this point that the next functional node is dedicated to checking wh-features. • Children project CP and apply Agree to its features, only once they have exhausted the lower heads. • Once CP becomes a Phase, it is also available for hosting the complementizers.

31. Conclusion • “Principles not specific to the faculty of language” could be prompted to account for parts of children’s production. • Children errors and deviations from what is predicted by these principles reflect children opting for the most economic derivation and most efficient computation

32. Thank you E-mail: armonls@mail.biu.ac.il