Abstract
The chapter reviews work on a central topic in acquisition from the perspective of generative grammar: the Binding principles that dictate how pronouns and reflexives behave. The core issue is the “Pronoun Interpretation Problem (PIP)”: do children actually know Principle B of binding and their knowledge is masked in performance, or is there a real problem with pronoun interpretation that may require integrating syntax and pragmatics? Hamann provides a summary of recent theoretical and empirical work on binding that makes it clear that there is more involved in interpretation of pronouns than the simple binding principles. The cross –linguistic asymmetries are reviewed, since pronominal clitics in Romance languages are found to be better understood than non-clitic pronouns, but not in the case of clitic climbing (ECM) environments. Yet recent results on successful performance of children acquiring German belie any simple account of the PIP. Various theorists have proposed coreference rules that require consideration of pragmatics in one way or another, and the interaction of the principles with discourse antecedents. Others stress the possibility of an underspecification of the features of the pronoun in acquisition. Recent work considering the roles of referentiality and topic-hood is explored.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
de Villiers et al. (2006) point to a principled problem inherent in the fexibility: whenever constraints are added to accommodate data this demonstrates a certain arbitrariness of the approach, see the ease with which Hendriks and Spenader (2006) change Fischer’s (2004) theoretically motivated constraint system in order to make it predictive of child data.
- 2.
- 3.
This is usually defined as the minimal category containing x, a governor of x and a SUBJECT (accessible to x).
- 4.
See Chomsky (1981) and many others for arguments that these two types of coindexations do not have the same properties.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
This is the account that Hestvik and Philip (1999) also offer for Norwegian since Norwegian pronouns move like clitics at LF.
- 8.
Note that this deictic guise or interpretation of the pronoun always involves pointing and is radically different from what Conroy et al. call the deictic interpretation of a pronoun.
- 9.
See also Gualmini and Meroni (2009), who suggest that the difficulty can be located in accommodating a “Question under discussion” for the derivation of an underinformative implicature.
- 10.
In one of the stories Bill, Mary and Jane want to draw somebody. They get paper and crayons and then Bill draws Mary and Mary draws Bill. The story ends with the sentences: “Nobody drew Jane. So Jane drew her”. Here the following problem may arise: If nobody drew Jane, then a child may find it confusing that Jane drew her – nobody did. The problem is that the quantifier in the intended interpretation ranges only over the two protagonists mentioned in the last part of the story. The child might interpret it as ranging over all the protagonists including Jane.
- 11.
Note here, that under a strict reading of Heim (1993), guise creation is not the crucial point in (11a), so that the criticism may be valid for Thornton and Wexler’s (1999) version but does not touch the original account. Note also that, Avrutin (1994, 1999) and Hamann (1997, 2002) may escape the criticism because they do not assume that children will always be able to create the guises required in complicated contexts, they refer specifically to the simple possibility of deictic anchoring which can provide the guise for the pronoun. Such non-adult deictic anchorage is evident in other areas of child speech as well, e.g. tense.
- 12.
A careful discussion of the problems of this experimental set-up can be found in Hamann (2002) who ran a control experiment showing that French children have no trouble in determining who can see whom in a mirror and do very well when there is a mirror and the simple Priniple B sentence (i). So it can be excluded that using mirror images added a conceptual difficulty for children. See also Coopmans and Philip (2000) and Baauw and Cuetos (2003) on this point.
- 13.
(i) La maman la voit.
The mom her sees
13 The possible exception are French subject clitics, for which different analyses have been proposed.
- 14.
Clitic chains show A-chain properties, see Rizzi (1986).
- 15.
-
(i)
Jean a mis le ballon derrière lui (*le)/ J’ai mis le ballon derrière moi (*me) John placed the ball behind HIM (*m)/ I put the ball behind ME (*me - clitic)
-
(ii)
Il y’avait sept linguistes dans la salle sans (*me) compter moi-meme
there were seven linguists in the class without counting (*me-clitic) myself.
-
(i)
- 16.
Such sentences show “clitic climbing” (reminiscent of Postal’s (1974) raise subject-to-object) because the object clitic from the lower clause climbs to the higher clause.
- 17.
Note that technical difficulties might arise since it must be explained how these [−R] elements can end up in high functional positions in the clause, establishing a chain with pro or trace in complement position.
- 18.
- 19.
Note that the assumption that coreference is not categorically excluded for clitics could also explain the results found by Zesiger et al. (2010): French children show better performance on reflexives than on clitic pronouns. The difference is not remarkable but significant and could represent the few cases where French children allow coreference.
- 20.
- 21.
Many seminar discussions on this point have shown that even adults have difficulties identifying the little bows the girl bears wear.
References
Avrutin, S. 1994. Psycholinguistic investigations in the theory of reference. Doctorial diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Avrutin, S. 1999. Development of the syntax-discourse interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Avrutin, S. 2004. Optionality in child and aphasic speech. Lingue e Linguaggio 1: 67–93.
Avrutin, S., and K. Wexler. 1992. Development of Principle B in Russian: Coindexation at LF and coreference. Language Acquisition 2: 259–306.
Avrutin, S., and R. Thornton. 1994. Distributivity and binding in child grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 25 (1): 167–171.
Baauw, S. 2000. Grammatical features and the acquisition of reference. A comparative study of Dutch and Spanish. Doctoral diss., Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Baauw, S. 2002. Grammatical features and the acquisition of reference. A comparative study of Dutch and Spanish’ GLOT International 6, 2/3: 65–71.
Baauw, S., and F. Cuetos. 2003. The interpretation of pronouns in Spanish language acquisition and breakdown: Evidence for the “Principle B Delay” as a Non-Unitary Phenomenon. Language Acquisition 11: 219–275.
Baauw, S., L. Escobar, and W. Philip. 1997. A delay of Principle B-Effect in Spanish speaking children: The role of lexical feature acquisition. In GALA 1997, ed. A. Sorace, C. Heycock, and R. Shillock, 16–21. Edinburgh: HCRC.
Beghelli, F., and T. Stowell. 1997. Distributivity and negation: the syntax of each and every. In Ways of scope taking, ed. A. Szabolsci, 71–109. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Belletti, A. 1999. Italian/Romance Clitics: Structure and derivation. In Clitics in the languages of Europe, ed. H. van Riemsdijk, 543–579. Berlin: Mouton – de Gruyter.
Bloom, P., A. Barss, J. Nicol, and L. Conway, L. 1994. Children’s knowledge of binding and coreference: Evidence from spontaneous speech. Language 70: 53–71.
Borer, H. 1984. Parametric syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Boster, C. T. 1991. Children’s failure to obey Principle B: Syntactic problem or lexical error? Ms., University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Burzio, L. 1986. Italian syntax. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Burzio, L. 1998. Anaphora and soft constraints. In Is the best good enough. Optimality and competition in syntax, ed. P. Barbosa, D. Fox, P. Hagstrom, M. McGinnis, and D. Pesetsky, 93–113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cardinaletti, A., and M. Starke. 1995. The tripartition of pronouns and its acquisition: Principle B puzzles are ambiguity problems. In NELS 25, ed. J. Beckman, 1–12. Philadelphia: University of Pennysylvania.
Cardinaletti, A., and M. Starke. 2000. An overview of the grammar of clitics. In The acquisition of scrambling and cliticization, ed. S. Powers and C. Hamann, 165–186. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Chien, Y.-C., and K. Wexler. 1990. Children’s knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evidence for the modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1: 225–295.
Chierchia, G., S. Crain, M.T. Guasti, A. Gualmini, and L. Meroni. 2001. The acquisition of disjunction: evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicature. In Proceedings of BUCLD 25, ed. A. Do, L. Dominguez, and A. Johansen, 157–168. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Chomsky, N. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Conroy, A., E. Takahashi, J. Lidz, and C. Phillips. 2009. Equal treatment for all antecedents: How children succeed with Principle B. Linguistic Inquiry 40: 446–486.
Coopmans, P., and W. Philip. 2000. Notes on the January experiment. Ms., Utrecht University, Utrecht.
Crain, S., and C. McKee. 1985. Acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora. In NELS 16, ed. S. Berman, J.W. Choe, and J. McDonough, 94–110. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, GLSA.
Crain, S., and R. Thornton. 1998. Investigations in universal grammar: A guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
De Villiers, J., J. Cahillane, and E. Altreuter. 2006. What can production reveal about principle B? In Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition-North America (GALANA), ed. K.U. Deen, J. Nomura, B. Schulz, and B. Schwartz, 89–100. Honolulu: University of Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics 4.
Delfitto, D. 2002. On the semantics of pronominal clitics and some of its consequences. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 1: 41–69.
Deutsch, W., C. Koster, and J. Koster. 1986. What can we learn from children’s errors in understanding anaphora? Linguistics 24: 203–225.
Elbourne, P. 2005. On the acquisition of Principle B. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 333–365.
Evans, G. 1980. Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 337–362.
Faltz, L.M. 1985. Reflexivization: A study in universal syntax. New York: Garland.
Fischer, S. 2004. Optimal binding. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22: 481–526.
Grillo, A. 2008. Generalized minimality. Syntactic underspecification in Broca’s aphasia. Doctoral diss., Utrecht, the Netherlands and University of Siena, Sienna, Italy.
Grimshaw, J., and S. Rosen. 1990. Knowledge and obedience: The developmental status of the binding theory. Linguistic Inquiry 21: 187–222.
Grodzinsky, Y., and T. Reinhart. 1993. The innateness of binding and coreference. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 69–102.
Gualmini, A., and L. Meroni. 2009. Scalar implicatures in child language: Cost and compliance. Presentation at GALA, Lisbon, September 2009.
Gualmini, A., S. Crain, L. Meroni, G. Chierchia, and M.-T. Guasti. 2001. At the semantics/pragmatics interface in child language. In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XI. Ithaca: CLC Publications, Department of Linguistics, Cornell University.
Hamann, C. 1997. From syntax to discourse. Children’s use of pronominal clitics, null subjects, infinitives and operators. Habilitation thesis, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Hamann, C. 2002. From syntax to discourse. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hamann, C., and E. Ruigendijk. 2009. The German pronoun puzzle. Presentation given at the 2nd NWLK (North West Linguistics Colloquium), Bremen.
Hamann, C., L. Rizzi, and U. Frauenfelder. 1996. The acquisition of subject and object clitics in French. In Generative perspectives on language acquisition, ed. H. Clahsen, 309–334. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hamann, C., O. Kowalski, and W. Philip. 1997. The French ‘Delay of Principle B’ Effect. In BUCLD 21, ed. E. Hughes, M. Hughes, and A. Greenhill, 205–219. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Heim, I. 1993. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. SfS-Report-07-93. Tübingen: University of Tübingen.
Heim, I. 1998. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. In The Interpretative Tract, ed. U. Sauerland and O. Percus, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 25, 205–246. Cambridge, MA: MIT, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MITWPL.
Heim, I., and A. Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hendriks, P., and J. Spenader. 2006. When production precedes comprehension: an optimization approach to the acquisition of pronouns. Language Acquisition 13: 319–348.
Hendriks, P., Siekman I., Smits E.-J., and J. Spenader. 2007. Pronouns in competition: Predicting acquisition delays cross-linguistically. In ZAS Papers in Linguistics, vol. 48 (Intersentential Pronominal Reference in Child and Adult Language. Proceedings of the Conference on Intersentential Pronominal Reference in Child and Adult Language), eds. D. Bittner and N. Gagarina, 75–101.
Hestvik, A., and W. Phillip. 1997. Reflexivity, anti-subject orientation and language acquisition. Proceedings of NELS 27: 171–185.
Hestvik, A., and W. Philip. 1999/2000. Binding and coreference in Norwegian child language. Language Acquisition 8: 171–235.
Higginbotham, J. 1983. Logical form, binding, and nominals. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 395–420.
Jäger, G. 2002. Some notes on the formal properties of bidirectional optimality theory. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 11: 427–451.
Jakubowicz, C. 1984. On markedness and binding principles. In Proceedings of NELS 14, ed. C. Jones and P. Sells, 154–182. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, GLSA.
Jakubowicz, C. 1989. Linguistic theory and language acquisition facts: Reformulation, maturation or invariance of binding principles. Paper presented at Knowledge and Language, Groningen, May 1989.
Kaufmann, D. 1988. Grammatical and cognitive interactions in the study of children’s knowledge of binding theory and reference relations. Doctoral diss., Temple University, Philadelphia.
Kayne, R. 1975. French syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kayne, R. 1991. Romance clitics, verb movement and PRO. Linguistic Inquiry 22: 647–686.
Levinson, S. 1987. Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora. Journal of Linguistics 23: 379–434.
Levinson, S. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lombardi, L., and J. Sarma. 1989. Against the bound variable hypothesis of the acquisition of Principle B. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC.
Manzini, R., and K. Wexler. 1987. Parameters, binding theory, and learnability. Linguistic Inquiry 18: 413–444.
Matsuoka, K. 1997. Binding conditions in young children’s grammar: Interpretation of pronouns inside conjoined NPs. Language Acquisition 6: 37–48.
McDaniel, D., and T. Maxfield. 1992. Principle B and contrastive stress. Language Acquisition 2: 337–358.
McDaniel, D., H. Cairns, and J. Hsu. 1990. Binding principles in the grammars of young children. Language Acquisition 1: 121–139.
McKee, C. 1992. A comparison of pronouns and anaphors in Italian and English acquisition. Language Acquisition 2: 21–54.
Noveck, I.A. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition 78: 165–188.
Papafragou, A. 2002. Scalar implicatures in language acquisition: Some evidence from Modern Greek. In Proceedings from the 38th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Papafragou, A., and J. Musolino. 2003. Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86: 253–282.
Philip, W., and P. Coopmans. 1996. The role of lexical feature acquisition in the development of pronominal anaphora. In Amsterdam series on child language development, vol. 5, ed. W. Philip and F. Wijnen. Amsterdam: Institute of General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam.
Pollard, C., and I. Sag. 1992. Anaphors in English and the scope of the binding theory. Linguistic Inquiry 23: 261–305.
Postal, P. 1974. On raising. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Reinhart, T. 1983. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. London: Croom Helm.
Reinhart, T. 2004. Processing or pragmatics? Explaining the coreference delay. In The processing and acquisition of reference, ed. T. Gibson and N. Perlmutter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Reinhart, T. 2006. Interface strategies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Reinhart, T., and E. Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 675–720.
Reuland, E. 1994. Commentary: The non-homogeneity of Condition B and related issues. In Syntactic theory and first language acquisition: Cross-linguistic perspectives, Binding, dependencies and learnability, vol. 2, ed. B. Lust, G. Hermon, and J. Kornfilt, 227–246. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Reuland, E. 2001. Primitives of binding. Linguistic Inquiry 32: 439–492.
Reuland, E. 2008. Anaphoric dependencies: How are they encoded? Towards a derivation-based typology. Ms., OTS, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Reuland, E. 2011. Anaphora and Language Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Reuland, E., and M. Everaert. 2000. Deconstructing binding. In Contemporary syntactic theory, ed. M. Baltin and C. Collins, 634–670. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rizzi, L. 1978. A restructuring rule in Italian syntax. In Recent transformational studies in European language, ed. S.J. Keyser, 113–158. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rizzi, L. 1982. Issues in Italian syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Rizzi, L. 1986. On the status of subject clitics in romance. In Studies in romance linguistics, ed. O. Jaeggli and C. Silva-Corvalan, 391–419. Dordrecht: Foris.
Rizzi, L. 1990. Relativized minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rizzi, L. 2004. Locality and the left periphery. In Structure and beyond, ed. A. Belletti, 223–251. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ross, J.R. 1982. Pronoun Deleting Processes in German. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Diego, California.
Ruigendijk, E. 2008. Reference assignment in German Preschool Children. In Proceedings of GALA 2007, ed. A. Gavarró and J. Freitas, 370–380. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
Ruigendijk, E., N. Friedmann, R. Novogrodsky, and N. Balaban. 2009. Symmetry in comprehension and production of pronouns: A comparison of German and Hebrew. Presented in GALA 2009, Lisbon, Portugal.
Sag, I. 1976. Deletion and logical form. Doctoral diss., University of Maryland, College Park.
Sigurjónsdóttir, S., and P. Coopmans. 1996. The acquisition of anaphoric relations in Dutch. In Amsterdam Series on Child Language Development, ASCLD 5. Amsterdam: Instituut Algemene Taalwetenschap 68.
Sigurjónsdóttir, S., and N. Hyams. 1992. Reflexivization and logophoricity: Evidence from the acquisition of Icelandic. Language Acquisition 2: 359–413.
Spenader, J., E.-J. Smits, and P. Hendriks. 2009. Coherent discourse solves the pronoun interpretation problem. Journal of Child Language 36: 23–52.
Sportiche, D. 1996. Clitic constructions. In Phrase structure and the Lexicon, ed. J.J. Rooryck and L. Zaring, 213–276. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Szabolcsi, A. 2001. The syntax of scope. In The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, ed. M. Baltin and C. Collins, 607–633. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thornton, R. 1990. Adventures in long-distance moving: The acquisition of complex wh-questions. Doctoral diss., University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Thornton, R., and K. Wexler. 1999. Principle B, VP-ellipsis, and interpretation in child grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thráinsson, H. 1976. Reflexives and subjunctives in Icelandic. In Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of NELS, L’Association linguistique de Montreal, Université de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, 225–239.
Utakis, S. 1995. Quantification and definiteness in child grammar. Doctoral diss., CUNY, New York.
Van der Lely, H., and L. Stollwerck. 1997. Binding theory and specifically language impaired children. Cognition 62: 245–290.
Van Gelderen, E. 2000. A history of English reflexive pronouns: Person, self, and interpretability. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Varlakosta, S. 2000. Lack of clitic-pronoun distinctions in the acquisition of Principle B in child Greek. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. S.C. Howell, S. Fish, and T. Keith-Lucas, 738–748. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Varlakosto, S., and J. Dullaart. 2001. The acquisition of pronominal reference by Greek-Dutch bilingual children: Evidence for early grammar differentiation and autonomous development in bilingual first language acquisition. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. A.H.-J. Do, L. Dominguez, and A. Johansen, 780–791. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Verbuk, A., and T. Roeper. 2010. How pragmatics and syntax make Principle B acquirable. Language Acquisition 17: 51–65.
Ward, G. 1983. On Nonreflexive Pronouns in Reflexive Environments. Penn review of Linguistics 7, 12–19.
Wexler, K., and Y-C. Chien. 1985. The development of lexical anaphors and pronouns. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development (PRCLD), Stanford University, 138–149.
William, E. 1977. Discourse and logical form. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 101–139.
Zesiger, P., L. Chillier-Zesiger, M. Arabatzi, L. Baranzini, S. Cronel-Ohayon, J. Franck, H.-U. Frauenfelder, C. Hamann, and L. Rizzi. 2010. The acquisition of pronouns by French children. A parallel study of production and comprehension. Applied Psycholinguistics 31: 571–603.
Zribi-Hertz, A. 1989. Anaphor binding and narrative point of view: English reflexive pronouns in sentence and discourse. Language 65: 695–727.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hamann, C. (2011). Binding and Coreference: Views from Child Language. In: de Villiers, J., Roeper, T. (eds) Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1688-9_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1688-9_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1687-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1688-9
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)