Abstract
Amritavalli and Jayaseelan (2005) propose that in Kannada and Malayalam, a clause structure does not project a Tense Phrase and what appears to be Tense in the affirmative verb is actually Aspect, and that finiteness is a property of Mood Phrase, which can be occupied by any one of the three elements: AGR (agreement), Neg (negation), or modal . In this chapter, we argue based on the research presented in Lakshmanan (2006), Kim and Phillips (1998) and Murasugi and Fuji (2008) that Tamil, Korean and Japanese-acquiring children around two years of age go through the stage of the Root Infinitive analogue in which they assume that their mother tongue is like Malayalam. The non-adult grammatical behavior of very young children is relevant for the long debate about the innate knowledge of grammar. If the ways where child and adult grammars can differ are restricted to ways in which adult grammars can differ from each other, then they would provide supportive evidence for the innateness of Universal Grammar.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Just like in English, very young children speaking Swahili also omit functional elements such as Tense and subject agreement (Deen 2002). An RI phenomenon has also been identified for children acquiring languages that do not have an infinitive construction. In Modern Greek, for example, a bare subjunctive/perfective is reported to be the Root Infinitive Analogue (RIA) (Varlokosta et al. 1996; Hyams 2002).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
While children produce erroneous nonfinite verbs in the matrix clause as in (ia) during the RI stage, they also produce adult-like finite verbs as in (ib) (Wexler 1994) in German.
- 5.
- 6.
The context for (15a) is the following: Sumihare’s father (Noji, the observer) went out for a walk with Sumihare on his back. Noji, Sumihare’s father, tried to get back home, but Sumihare pointed to a different direction and produced a bare adverbial “atti (there)” twice. Then, Sumihare, again, got frustrated and produced the V-ta form, “atti i-ta (there go-Past)” angrily.
- 7.
It is also interesting to note that na in Japanese behaves like Kannada in the sense that Mood Phrase can be occupied by any one of the three elements AGR (agreement), Neg (negation), or modal (Amritavalli and Jayaseelan 2005). It also reminds us of the analysis of the adult Root Infinitives by Etxepare and Grohmann (2005), which states that the adult Root Infinitives consist of two overtly expressed parts: the root infinitive proper (RI), orthographically indicated by “?!” (evoking a question-like exclamation) such as “John go to the movies?!”, and the Coda (a further exclamation that seems to deny the truth value of the RI) such as “I would never do such a thing!” According to Etxepare and Grohmann (2005), the two properties are also found in Spanish as in “Yo ir a esa fiesta?! Jamás! (Me go to that party?! Never!)”.
References
Aksu-Koç, A., and K.N. Ketrez. 2003. Early verbal morphology in Turkish: Emergence of inflections. In Development of verb inflection in first language acquisition: A cross linguistic perspective, ed. W.U. Dressler, D. Bittner, and M. Kilani-Schoch, 27–52. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Aljenaie, K. 2000. The emergence of tense and agreement in Kuwaiti children speaking Arabic. In Reading Working Paper in Linguistics, Vol. 4, eds. R. Ingham and P. Kerswill, 1–24.
Amritavalli, R., and K.A. Jayaseelan. 2005. Finiteness and negation in Dravidian. In The oxford handbook of comparative syntax 2005, ed. G. Cinque, and R. Kayne, 178–220. New York: Oxford University Press.
Blom, E., and F. Wijnen. 2000. How Dutch Children’s root infinitives become modal. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 24), 128–139.
Coene, M., H. Taelman, L. Avram, and S. Gillis. 2005. Early bare infinitives are universally non-finite…but not always infinitives! Paper presented at 5th International Council for Central and East European Studies, Berlin, July 26, 2005.
Deen, K. U. 2002. The Omission of Inflection Prefixes in the Acquisition of Nairobi Swahili. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.
Etxepare, R., and K. K. Grohmann. 2005. Towards a grammar of adult root infinitives. In Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 24) eds. J. Alderete, C. -H. Han, and A. Kochetov, 129–137.
Haegeman, L. 1995. Root infinitives, tense, and truncated structures in Dutch. Language Acquisition 4: 205–255.
Hoekstra, T., and N. Hyams. 1998. Aspects of root infinitives. Lingua 106: 91–112.
Hyams, Nina. 2002. Clausal structure in child Greek: A reply to Varlokosta, Vainikka and Rohrbacher and a reanalysis. The Linguistic Review 19 (3): 225–269.
Kato, S., Y. Sato, Y. Chikuda, R. Miyoshi, Y. Sakai, and M. Koizumi. 2003. “Root Infinitives”: Nihongo-karano Kensho [“Root Infinitives”: From the Perspectives of Japanese], Tohoku University Linguistics Journal 12. Sendai: Tohoku University.
Kim, M., and C. Phillips. 1998. Complex verb constructions in child Korean: Overt markers of covert functional structure. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 22), 430–441.
Krämer, I. 1993. The licensing of subjects in early child language. MITWPL #19:197–212.
Lakshmanan, U. 2006. Assessing linguistic competence: Verbal inflection in child Tamil. Language Assessment Quarterly, 3(2): 171–205. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15434311laq0302_5.
Lee, C. 1993. The acquisition of mood indicators in Korean. In Harvard Studies in Korean Linguistics V, eds. S. Kuno et al., 27–41.
Murasugi, K. 2009. What Japanese-speaking Children’s errors tell us about syntax. Paper Presented at GLOW in Asia VII, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, February 28, 2009.
Murasugi, K., and C. Fuji. 2008. Root infinitives: The parallel routes the Japanese- and Korean-speaking children step in. Paper Presented at Japanese/Korean Linguistic Conference 18, City University of New York, November 13, 2008. (Paper appeared in Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Vol. 19, eds. Ho-Min Sohn et al., 527–541. Stanford: CSLI (Center for the Study of Language and Information) in 2011).
Murasugi, K., C. Fuji, and T. Hashimoto. 2007. What’s acquired later in an agglutinative language. Paper Presented at Asian GLOW VI, Chinese University of Hong Kong, December 27, 2007.
Murasugi, K., and T. Nakatani. 2013. Three types of ‘Root Infinitives’: Theoretical implications from child Japanese. In Japanese/Korean Linguistics, vol. 20, eds. Bjarke Frellesvig and Peter Sells, 263–280., Stanford: CSLI (Center for the Study of Language and Information).
Murasugi, K, T. Nakatani, and C. Fuji. 2009. The roots of root infinitive analogues: The surrogate verb forms common in adult and child grammars. Poster Presented at BUCLD 34, Boston University, November 7th. (Paper appeared in the BUCLD 34 Proceedings Online Supplement in 2010).
Noji, J. 1973–1977. Youji no Gengoseikatu no Zittai [The Language Use in Child Age] I–IV. Bunka Hyoron Syuppan, Tokyo. (Also available in CHILDES as NOJI corpus.).
Okubo, A. 1967. Youji Gengo no Hattatsu [The Development of Child Language]. Tokyo: Tokyodou Shuppan.
Poeppel, D. 1996. Commentary on Chapter 10. In Towards a genetics of language, ed. Mabel L. Rice, 291–296. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ramadoss, D., and R. Amritavalli. 2007. The acquisition of functional categories in Tamil with special reference to negation. Nanzan Linguistics 1 (1): 67–84.
Rasetti, L. 2003. Optional Categories in Early French Syntax: A Developmental Study of Root Infinitives and Null Arguments. Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Genéve, Switzerland.
Rizzi, L. 1993/1994. Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: The case of root infinitives. Language Acquisition 3: 371–393.
Sarma, V. (1995). How many branches to the syntactic tree? Disagreement over agreement [on children's acquisition of Tamil]. In Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 25, vol. 2, ed. J. N. Beckmanvol, 89–103.
Sano, T. 1995. Roots in Language Acquisition: A Comparative Study of Japanese and European Languages. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.
Thomas‚ T.‚ and A. Vainikka (1994). Development of functional projections in Tamil. Penn Linguistics Review.
Varlokosta, S., A. Vainikka, and B. Rohrbacher. 1996. Root infinitives without infinitives. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 20), 816–827.
Wexler, K. 1994. Optional infinitives, head movement, and economy of derivation. In Verb movement, ed. N. Hornstein, and D. Lightfoot, 305–335. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Murasugi, K. (2017). Root Infinitive Analogues: Evidence from Tamil, Korean, and Japanese. In: Sengupta, G., Sircar, S., Raman, M., Balusu, R. (eds) Perspectives on the Architecture and Acquisition of Syntax. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4295-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4295-9_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-4294-2
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-4295-9
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)