Turismo en el estado de Puebla

Assuming that children have not developed a mechanism which could project NP into DP, it follows that early child nominals are simply lexical projections of a head Noun, an NP, while its adult counterpart is a DP. This means that there is no evidence of the acquisition of the morphosyntax of referential determiners

F irs t Language Acquisition

such as, a, the, this, that, etc., of the possessive detenniner - 's, or of case-marked

pronominal determiners such as I/me/my. This claim is supported by the fact

that children do not use determiners in contexts where adults are required to use them:

(6) a. Where helicopter? / Here helicopter./ Where bee? (Stefan ITmonths)

b. Open door. / Want ball./ Want car (Stefan 19)

c. Open can./Open box./ Eat cookie (Allison 22)

(Radford 1990, 83-84)

In the above examples, a singular count noun is required to be headed by premodifiers in adult speech.

There are many possible counterexamples to the claim that child grammars lack a D-system. Specifically, there are examples which show that children at

this stage use the demonstrative this and that, as Radford (1990,100) points out:

(7) Want that. / Want this (Daniel 19)

How the above examples are analyzed may differ from researcher to researcher.

That and this might be analyzed as pronominal DPs (e.g. DPs headed by a head

pronominal D). If this were so, it would follow that Daniel had acquired a D- system at the age of 19 months. However, the child who uttered (7) at this stage never combined demonstratives with nominals. One of the defining properties of functional categories is that they take a specific type of complement; for example I takes a VP, etc. according to Abney (1987, 64-5). Therefore, there is

no plausible reason to say that this and that are determiners taking NP

complements. That/this is most plausibly analyzed as having the status of NP.

This NP analysis for this/that might be extended to other types of pronouns which

occur in child utterances such as it, what, etc. They are not case-marked

F irs t Language Acquisition

children use that and this frequently at this stage, but there are no data recording

the use of the articles a/the, compared with ample data showing the use of that,

this and it.

(8) a. What’s this? Spoon (Paula 18)

b. What do you want? Want cup (Daniel 23)

(Radford 1990, 84-85) (The first part of each utterance is a question asked by an adult.)

Therefore, it appears that there is some difference in status between a/the and

this/that in early child grammars.

Giusti (1997) argues for the different syntactic status of different determiners in adult grammars. Although I do not go into details here, some relevant points are useful for our discussion. She has examined those elements which have often been treated as determiners: articles, demonstratives and quantifiers. If they are all determiners, they are supposed to occupy the head D position. However, as she points out, they behave differently. Articles are close to the prototypical functional element in terms of the functional properties proposed by Abney (1987, 64f). They are phonologically and morphologically dependent on the head noun; they are strictly inseparable from their complement; and although functional categories or articles play some role in interpretation, their semantic contribution is minuscule, compared with that of lexical categories.

On the other hand, demonstratives have a semantic value. Although they lack descriptive content like articles, they are crucial for the interpretation of the referential index of the noun phrase. Moreover, even if they constitute a closed class, they belong to the broad semantic field of deixis which includes adverbials and pronominals; and they are neither phonologically nor morphologically dependent. Belonging to a closed class, therefore, is not conclusive evidence for the functional status of demonstratives (Giusti op.cit. 111-112). It is true that the differentiation of demonstratives and articles is hard to draw in some cases.

F irs t Language Acquisition

However, the distinction is clear in cases where the reading of a sentence which is given by an empty D by default is overruled by the presence of demonstratives as discussed in section 4.2 of chapter three. Further, there are languages like KiSwahili which have demonstratives and lack articles. The obvious conclusion to draw from the above facts is that demonstratives should be differentiated from articles. In the literature, in fact, there is no agreement on the status of bare demonstratives, and Giusti (op.cit.) leaves open the question of what kind of category they are. Hence, I tentatively assume that demonstratives are not D-

heads. Accordingly, it is not implausible to conclude that that/this in early child

utterances is a NP. Hence, a better criterion for judging the acquisition of a D-

system would be a child’s mastery of the articles a/the.

This conclusion fits in with the analysis of OE demonstratives in chapter 3.

The OB demonstratives {se and pes) are analyzed not as determiners, but as

having the status of N, and they were used as pronouns without the company of nominal complements, i.e. they were used independently.

In line with the above discussion, it follows that the sporadic occurrence of - 's

in child utterances doesn’t entail that it is functioning as a genitive determiner as

in adult speech, but rather as an NP. This sheds interesting light on the

existence of potential counterexamples to the claim that children have not

acquired the morphosyntax of genitive -'s. Typical examples are given in (9a,

b):

(9) a. Mommy’s / Mommy key (Gia 20, holding mother’s key)

(Bloom 1970, 93) b. It Daddy’s (It’s Daddy’s)

c. Daddy one (Daddy’s one)

(Smith 1973, 68)

Interestingly, according to the observation in Cazden (1968), some children at this

F irst Language Acquisition

where there is no overt nominal following the - *s) but systematically omit -’s in

prenominal possessives (i.e. structures like Daddy’s new car where the possessed

nominal is overtly specified).

There is much debate about their grammatical status (cf. Radford 1990, 107).

Constructions such as Mommy key or Daddy one pose no problem, since Mommy

and Daddy function as the specifier of the following N-bar key/one. How should

we analyze Mommy’s and Daddy ’si One possibility is that possessive - ’s might

have the status of a pro-N-bar constituent: this would mean that in the elliptic

utterance Mommy’s/Daddy’s, the NP Mommy!Daddy would function as the

specifier of the pronominal N-bar -’s. If this were right, (9b) and (9c) would

have the following structures, respectively:

( 1 0 ) a . [n p [n p daddy] [n’ - ’s] ]

b. [n p[n p daddy][N’ one]]

In (10) one and ’s have the same categorial status: that is, children have

(mis)analyzed possessives’s as an N-bar proform. However, a problem with this

analysis is that we do not find structures such as *Want blue's ’ or W ant’s ’.

A second possibility would be to analyze ’s as a derivational suffix which has

the function of converting a noun into a predicative possessive adjective. Both

analyses have drawbacks. T h is’s might be an “impostor” (i.e. a morpheme with

much the same phonological forms as, but a different grammatical function from,

its immediate adult counterpart). The sequence Daddy ’5 might be better

analyzed as an inseparable nominal NP as a whole. If this is so, then, the

presence o f’s poses no threat to our claim.