Ways of Avoiding Intervention: Some Thoughts on the Development of Object Relatives, Passive and Control

In her The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10, Carol Chomsky observed that certain syntactic constructions such as subject control with promise type verbs are acquired surprisingly late. She argued that initially children strictly adhere to Rosenbaum’s 1967 Minimal Distance Principle, barring subject control, and exceptions to the principle are acquired at later points in development. In this paper we would like to argue that these cases are part of a much larger class of syntactic configurations which are “complex” for the child to compute. We propose that the critical notion is “intervention”: the child cannot compute a local relation across an intervener close enough in structural type to the target of the relation. In fact, this follows from a general locality principle, Relativized Minimality (RM, Rizzi 1990, 2004), also holding in adult grammars; our hypothesis is that the intervention effect can be voided through the adoption of certain structural strategies which become accessible only at later stages in development. We will first present two cases discussed in previous work, which involve different adult strategies avoiding intervention: object relatives and passive; we will then go back to control and try to trace back subject control to a similar explanatory scheme.