Speakers predictably make errors during spontaneous speech. Listeners may identify such errors and repair the input, or their analysis of the input, accordingly. Two written questionnaire studies investigated error compensation mechanisms in sentences with doubled quantifiers such as Many students often turn in their assignments late. Results show a considerable number of undoubled interpretations for all items tested (though fewer for sentences containing doubled negation than for sentences containing many-often, every-always, or few-seldom). This evidence shows that the compositional form-meaning pairing supplied by the grammar is not the only systematic mapping between form and meaning. Implicit knowledge of the workings of the performance systems provides an additional mechanism for pairing sentence form and meaning. Alternate accounts of the data based on either a concord interpretation or an emphatic interpretation of the doubled quantifier do not explain why listeners fail to apprehend the ‘extra meaning’ added by the potentially redundant material only in limited circumstances.

The existence of substantive parametric variation in syntax, as characterized in Chomsky 1981, has been questioned in the more recent generative literature, notably in Borer 1984, Fukui 1986, and Chomsky 1993. This article provides converging evidence from child language acquisition and comparative syntax for the existence of a syntactic parameter in the classical sense of Chomsky 1981, with simultaneous effects on syntactic argument structure (e.g., verb-particle constructions) and complex word-formation (root compounding). The implications are first that syntax is indeed subject to points of substantive parametric variation as envisioned in Chomsky 1981, and second that the time course of child language acquisition is a potentially rich source of evidence about the innate constraints on language variation.

Backward control is an obligatory interpretational dependency between an overt controller and a nonovert controllee in which the controllee is structurally superior to the controller: Meg persuaded Δi[Roni to give up]. It contrasts with ordinary forward control, in which the controller is structurally higher: Meg persuaded Roni [Δi to give up]. Although backward control has been previously documented (Polinsky & Potsdam 2002a), clear cases are rare. This article presents an alternation between forward and backward object control in the Austronesian language Malagasy and argues for the backward-control structure. Backward control is thus a reality and needs to be incorporated into any comprehensive theory of control. The article argues against an analysis of backward control that identifies the controllee as the null pronominal pro.

Poeppel and Wexler (1993) present the Full Competence Hypothesis, which claims that German children very early (circa age 2) acquire finiteness, verb agreement, and verb movement. They also propose the Grammatical Infinitive Hypothesis, which states that children have the option of using either a finite or nonfinite form and randomly select verbs for one or the other. The data on which these claims are based consist of 282 sentences from a German child at 2;1. We present a more conservative alternative, the Lexical/Semantic Hypothesis, which proposes that early learning is more lexically oriented, and that early word combinations can be explained by more semantically oriented accounts. To replace the Grammatical Infinitive Hypothesis, we put forth the Modal Hypothesis, which states that the distinction between finite and nonfinite forms can be accounted for by the modality of the sentence. Nonfinite forms occur in modal contexts, and finite ones occur in nonmodal ones. Data to support this alternative are presented from the analysis of 1084 sentences from four German children, including the subject studied in Poeppel and Wexler.