Compounding and inflection in German child language

Abstract

A central question in language acquisition is whether children’s grammatical principles are identical to adults’ or whether grammatical principles undergo substantial developmental changes. Recently, researchers studying the acquisition of syntax have martialed substantial evidence in favor of a ‘continuity’ position, in which syntactic principles are innately given. Children obey many syntactic principles from as early an age as they can be tested, they make few errors, and often display knowledge of grammatical principles even when the environment offers little explicit evidence, leading to a nativist argument that Crain (1991) dubbed ‘language learning in the absence of experience.’

This research was supported by a grant of the German Science Foundation to Clahsen (Grant-No C197/5.1 — 5.3), and an NDSE Graduate Fellowship to Marcus (NIH Grant HD 18381 to Steven Pinker, MIT). We are especially grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst ‘German Academic Exchange Service’ for the grant, awarded jointly to Harald Clahsen and Steven Pinker (MIT), that enabled this collaboration. An earlier version of this paper appeared in the Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 1 (1993), 1–31. We are grateful for comments from two anonymous reviewers. Address for correspondence: Clahsen, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester C04 3SQ, UK, or send e-mail to harald@essex.ac.uk.