One of the goals of language acquisition research is to discover what linguistic abilities children bring to the language learning process. In their Maturation Hypothesis, Borer and Wexler (henceforth B&W 1987) suggest delayed production of verbal passives and other A-movement constructions in child English and child Hebrew is an indication that grammar is not fully mature at birth and that ove...

In this paper we examine the development of passive participles in the spontaneous speech of seven English speaking children. We argue that the grammatical properties which distinguish passive participles as a category emerge gradually and are learned as motivated properties of a complex, polysemous construction. The data reveals a regular progression from early adjectival uses to true verbal p...

In this paper, we describe a multilingual open-source computational grammar of Persian, developed in Grammatical Framework (GF) – A type-theoretical grammar formalism. We discuss in detail the structure of different syntactic (i.e. noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectival phrases, etc.) categories of Persian. First, we show how to structure and construct these categories individually. Then we des...

In this paper I present two classes of double object constructions in Modern Greek, i.e., the genitive, as well as the double accusative, ditransitive constructions. I show that these two classes differ from one another in that not both of them permit derivational processes such as the formation of adjectival passives. I also look at the case properties associated with the verbs which head Mode...

This paper suggests that the theory of A-chain maturation can account for an asymmetry in the development of “full” unaccusatives and passives in Japanese. We show that the early success with full unaccusatives is due to the availability of unergative misanalysis. The nominative case marker drop phenomenon and the syntactic analysis of the full unaccusative also support this hypothesis. We clai...