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The optional subject phenomenon in young children's English: a case study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Richard Ingham
Richard Ingham*
Affiliation:
University of Reading
*
Department of Linguistic Science, University of Reading, Whiteknights, P.O. Box 218, Reading, RG6 2AA, UK.
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Abstract

Recent treatments of the optionality of sentence subjects in young-children's English have sought to link this phenomenon, and its eventual demise, to the development of the child's verb inflection system or to a parameter-resetting within the INFL (‘inflection’) constituent of the child's grammar. It is claimed that subject optionality disappears when these developments occur. The case-study reported here investigated the productive language of an English child between 2;5 and 3;0. It found that subjects were no longer optional at a stage when none of the reflexes of INFL claimed in the literature to be associated with the disappearance of subject optionality had yet been acquired. The possibility that subjects were present only when communicatively required was rejected. The frequency of subject realization of a Japanese child aged 3;0 was used to provide a measure of expected realization when subjects are not grammatically required. It is concluded that subject obligatoriness in English may be acquired as a characteristic of the language sui generis, independently of developments elsewhere in the child's emerging grammar.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , February 1992 , pp. 133 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank Paul Fletcher for making available the data used in the main study, and also Fusae Nagasawa and Kazumi Hiramatsu for their help with the transcription and interpretation of the Japanese data. The helpful comments received from two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are offered to Mr and Mrs Kanazone for their kind co-operation.

References

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