Syntax at Age Two: Cross-Linguistic Differences*

There’s a lot missing from the speech of a typical two-year-old. This in itself is of no great interest to the linguist—after all, there are lots of other things that two-year-olds aren’t that great at. What makes the two-year-old more interesting to the linguist is that there are striking regularities in what gets missed out where. This paper takes a cross-linguistic look at regularities of omission in twoyear-old syntax and morphology, primarily at so-called ‘root infinitives’ (Weverink 1989; Wexler 1994; Rizzi 1994b), and argues for the following main conclusions: