Peripheral Positions in Early Greek

This paper aims to provide a new approach to the development of clause structure in L1 acquisition on the basis of the distinction between LF-interpretable and LFuninterpretable features which is argued to have effects on learnability. The study concentrates on the acquisition of syntactic phenomena which are related to the syntax / pragmatics interface, namely focusing, dislocation and clitic-doubling in Greek. On the assumption that these syntactic phenomena involve a grammatical representation of certain functional features on ‘peripheral’ functional heads (CP / FP), the aim is to identify a developmental pattern that describes the sequence in which these structures emerge in Greek L1 acquisition. The early acquisition of the left-periphery is then juxtaposed to the relatively delayed acquisition of the inflectional domain.