LING 350 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Nonfinite Verb, Null-Subject Language, Finite Verb
Document Summary
Preposed subjects: sv that-trace effects. (*who did you say that left?) No that-trace effects. (who did you say that left?) (rich agreement) *who do you think that it has arrived. If the input to the learner includes sentences with missing subjects, this implies they are being exposed to a pro-drop language (and an associated range of properties follows automatically) Otherwise -> non pro-drop (with a different range of associated properties) Transfer can result in structures being produced, which are not possible in the relevant monolingual grammar. These structures are referred to by genesee et al. as target-deviant (often said to involve negative transfer, especially in the context of l2 acquisition) Example 1: the two languages differ as to a particular structure, which gets used in one of the languages because of influence of the other. Yip and matthews 2000: cantonese/english bilingual child (cantonese dominant).
