Children are in control.

Abstract

We argue on the basis of recent experimental results that modular principles of universal grammar (UG) play a continuous role in the first language acquisition of control. Our results involve both comprehension and production data from 108 3- to 8-year old children who are acquiring English. The results provide evidence against the hypothesis that there is a "stage" at which children do not know fundamental grammatical principles of control, or fail to apply the basic structural analysis relevant to control. We suggest that previous proposals for this hypothesis have been misled by (1) attention to only one aspect of the knowledge of control, namely choice of antecedent in comprehension of the embedded null subject in these structures and (2) misinterpretation of the nature of the principle by which children overgeneralize the choice of object as antecedent in control structures. Although the new results do replicate delay in acquisition with the unique subject-control verb "promise", they suggest that this delay is caused by a need to integrate modular principles of UG with language-specific principles by which the lexicon and syntax (constituent structure and case) are related. The overgeneralization of choice of object as antecedent is shown to reflect a continuous principle of syntactic minimality.