A-chain Maturation Reexamined: Why Japanese Children Perform Better on “Full” Unaccusatives than on Passives
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper suggests that the theory of A-chain maturation can account for an asymmetry in the development of “full” unaccusatives and passives in Japanese. We show that the early success with full unaccusatives is due to the availability of unergative misanalysis. The nominative case marker drop phenomenon and the syntactic analysis of the full unaccusative also support this hypothesis. We claim that the delay in the acquisition of the full passive is due to the ACDH and also the non-existence of the adjectival-passive strategy in Japanese.
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