Can children tell us anything we did not know about parameter clustering?

Part of

The Limits of Syntactic Variation
Edited by Theresa Biberauer
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 132] 2008
► pp. 459–482

Larisa Avram

Martine Coene

The present paper provides evidence that children are not different from

adults with respect to phrase structure building, a process considered to

be highly dependent on feature valuation. Lexical heads are taken from

the lexicon with open feature values that are specified in the course of the

derivation. Under such a view, linguistic development is mainly restricted

to the lexicon, the projection of functional structure following from the

stepwise identification and valuation of the features encoded by the

morphological markers on lexical items. Based on data from child language,

it is argued that language acquisition consists in choosing the particular

values that correspond to the target language.

Published online: 17 September 2008