Structural complexity and the acquisition of recursive locative PPs

This paper examines the experimental results that reveal the referential behavior of children and how they navigate the complexity and quantity of structure in recursive NPs. Modification introduces complexity in the syntax and the semantics of noun phrases. Recursive modification, in particular, seems heavily constrained in the speech of children. We explore the source of children’s difficulty in this domain and whether the complexity introduced by NP modification relates to the task of restriction and the processing of descriptive content, or whether the syntax and semantics of NP embedding specifically introduces complexity in acquisition. However, these results also show that this complexity must be considered separately from the quantity of structure in meeting the referential task. As such, in this paper we focus on the results that show that children will at times produce overly-elaborated sentences (i.e. sentences with more structure) in response to the referential task which avoid recursive embedding, but introduce complexities in other ways. We concentrate on one specific type, which is the production of referential descriptions containing what we call a DP-internal anaphoric dependency (DPIAD). These dependencies are found in sentences where a pronoun within a locative PP modifier co-refers with a c-commanding NP within the same DP, such as the alligatori with a bird on iti. An examination of DPIADs reveals how children negotiate the different linguistic strategies in meeting a referential task, and contributes to our understanding of the notion of semantic complexity in general.