LSA.216 | Seminar in the Theory of the Acquisition of Inflection and Clause Structure

Luigi Rizzi and Kenneth Wexler
MW 1:00-2:40
location: 32-141
course web site: http://lsa.dlp.mit.edu/Class/216

This course will examine the most up to date approaches to the early development of inflectional and clause structure. The major alternatives will be discussed, with an attempt to tease out the empirical and theoretical differences. Major attention will be placed on distinguishing approaches based on tree-pruning (the Truncation Hypothesis) and those based on the syntactic/semantic computations (Unique Checking Constraint). A wide variety of empirical literature will be presented. The idea is to see how much empirical ground can be covered by the approaches and what the alternatives mean in terms of both linguistic theory and our theory of child development.