This thesis investigates children’s mental representation of syntactic structure and how their acquisition and production of syntax is affected by lexical and semantic factors, focusing on threeand four-year-old children. It focuses on a construction that has been a frequent subject of language acquisition research: the passive. It is often claimed that English-speaking children acquire the pas...

In Korean, there are many little words that can best be analyzed as clitics: The copula iand the adjectival ha-, as well as some nominal and verbal particles. Among others, the clitic analysis of adjectival haleads to a unified account of light predicate constructions.

Passive and impersonal constructions have a strikingly different status in current theoretical and descriptive studies. All formal approaches recognize passive constructions and provide some means of relating their properties to those of corresponding actives. Any framework that did not would be considered fundamentally deficient or incomplete. Many descriptive grammars likewise apply a broad n...

Japanese has three passives, Direct (1), Niyotte (2), and Indirect (3), which show different syntactic and semantic characteristics (Hoshi 1999). In this paper, I propose an analysis of Japanese passives as verbs instantiating three types of non-finite complementation: control, raising, and ECM, and argue that the proposed analysis provides a principled account for them. Previous studies have i...

In the period in which language should be acquired, auditory input deprivation compromises oral exposure. The literature reports difficulties comprehension of syntactic dependencies resulting from A’ movement, but no acquisition structures with A-movement hearing-impaired children hearing aids. Our study investigates effects total linguistic during first year(s) life (critical acquisition) and ...