Partial Constraint Ordering in Child French Syntax Géraldine Legendre

Partial Constraint Ordering in Child French Syntax

Reanalyzing production data from three French children, we make three basic points. First, we show that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition (in child French). Tense production starts and ends at near-adult levels, but suffers a “dip” in production at the second stage. Agreement develops linearly, going roughly from none to 100% over the same time. This profi...

An Optimality-Theoretic Model of Acquisition of Tense and Agreement in French

We present a novel theoretical model of multiple stages in the acquisition of tense and agreement in Child French. First, we show that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition. Over the three stages of development attested in the data, tense production starts and ends at near-adult levels, but suffers a “dip” in production at the second stage. Agreement develops ...

Code Switching in Urban Wolof: a Case for Violable Constraints

Urban Wolof (UW) is an instance of Wolof-French code-switching (CS). On the basis of a new corpus of conversations collected in Senegal we present evidence that UW fits nicely into the cross-linguistic CS typology, once syntactic constraints on CS are construed as violable, as proposed in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky [1993]/ 2004). Basically, UW is a striking case of CS in which a sing...

Press. Optimality Theory in Syntax

Optimality Theory in Syntax Géraldine Legendre Within generative approaches to syntax, OT stands as an alternative theory of constraint interaction to the Principle-and-Parameter Theory (PPT) of Universal Grammar articulated in Chomsky (1981). Comparing both theories helps understand what OT syntax is and what it is not. The fundamental claim of OT is that universal well-formedness constraints ...

French Inchoatives and the Unaccusativity Hypothesis*