ACQUISITION OF ADJECTIVES

[William B. Snyder]

Dear Jeannette,

I have a (co-authored) paper that's about to appear in _Language
Acquisition_, and might be suitable for your class:

Snyder, William, Ann Senghas, and Kelly Inman (in press) Agreement
  morphology and the acquisition of noun-drop in Spanish. _Language
  Acquisition_.

The paper concerns the idea (promoted by Borer 1986, and still popular
in the Generative literature) that syntactic variation can be reduced to
variation in overt morphological paradigms.

We argue against this idea in the particular case of Spanish "noun-drop"
(e.g. _el rojo_ 'the red', for English _the red one_).  In a case study of
a Spanish-learning child, we show that the potentially relevant
morphological paradigms (gender- and number-marking on the adjective and
determiner) are all mastered significantly earlier (by binomial test) than
noun-drop.  For a period of about four months, the child consistently
supplies an overt noun, where an adult (or she herself, slightly later)
would omit the noun most of the time.  Hence, rich agreement morphology on
adjectives/determiners *isn't* sufficient to make noun-drop grammatical in
the language.

Anyhow, I'll be happy to pass along a preprint if you're interested.

Best wishes,

William

Prof. William B. Snyder
Department of Linguistics
University of Connecticut

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Jeannette Schaeffer wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I am supposed to teach a course on the (first language) acquisition of
> adjectives within a generative framework next semester. It's a course
> for 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate students. Do you have any
> suggestions as to which papers/articles I could/should discuss?
>
> Thank you very much in advance!
>
> Jeannette Schaeffer
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jeannette Schaeffer, Ph.D.
> Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
> Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
> P.O. Box 653
> Be'er Sheva 84105
> ISRAEL
> Phone: +972-8-646 1118
> Fax: +972-8-647 2907