Adjunct control and the poverty of the stimulus

Abstract

Subject control in non-finite adjuncts is observed across languages (as in 'John called Mary after drawing a picture'). Research on the acquisition of adjunct control has generally focused on the relevant grammatical components and when they are acquired. This paper considers these components in the context of the linguistic input to ask how control in adjuncts is acquired. Although adjunct control is available in the input, the instances themselves do not provide evidence for abstract syntactic relations. Implications are considered for linguistic dependencies and the evidence in the input.1. This paper is based on these components, but may also be considered in the context of other frameworks; importantly, adjunct control involves a locality constraint which is structurally defined. This constraint is the focus of this paper.