Parameter Setting and the Development of Pronouns and Reflexives

Solan, Lawrence M.

doi:10.1007/978-94-009-3727-7_8

Cited by 31 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Examples of languages for which the DPBE has been reported include English (Jakubowicz, 1984;Chien and Wexler, 1990;Wexler and Chien, 1985;Solan, 1987;Grodzinsky and Reinhart, 1993;Thornton and Wexler, 1999;McDaniel et al, 1990;McKee, 1992;McKee et al, 1993), Dutch (Koster, 1993;Sigurjó nsdó ttir and Coopmans, 1996;Philip and Coopmans, 1996), Icelandic (Sigurjó nsdó ttir and Hyams, 1992;Sigurjó nsdó ttir, 1992), and Russian (Avrutin and Wexler, 1992). However, not all languages show the effect.…”

Section: The Delay Of Principle B Effectmentioning

confidence: 96%

Morphological transparency and the Delay of Principle B Effect

Rooryck

Wyngaerd

2015

Lingua

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In L1 acquisition of English, Dutch, Russian, and Icelandic, children do not acquire Principle B until age 7--8, while in L1 acquisition of Italian, French, and German children no such delay is observed. This is the Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE). Existing accounts of this contrast in terms of the clitic status of the relevant pronouns or their referential properties are unable to account for the dividing line between the languages with and without the DPBE. We relate the DPBE in language acquisition to the Absence of Principle B Effect (APBE) in the adult language. The APBE is the fact that cross-linguistically pronouns express reflexive meanings when dedicated reflexive pronouns are not available. The reason for this is that Principle B effects result from the competition between pronouns and dedicated reflexives. The delay in the acquisition of Principle B is accounted for by a delay in this competition taking effect. This delay is in turn caused by the morphological makeup of dedicated reflexive pronouns. Principle B will be acquired sooner, i.e. there will be no DPBE, when the internal morphological makeup of dedicated reflexives is more transparent. Only if dedicated reflexives are easily recognised as such in the course of acquisition will they compete with pronouns from the start. In such a case, there will be no developmental delay in the acquisition of Principle B. This approach allows us to correctly predict which languages do and which do not show the effect.

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Section: The Delay Of Principle B Effectmentioning

confidence: 96%

Morphological transparency and the Delay of Principle B Effect

Rooryck

Wyngaerd

2015

Lingua

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“…A number of early studies of the DPBE used act-out tasks (Jakubowicz 1984, Solan 1987, Lombardi and Sarma 1989. These tasks have the limitation that they track a child's preferred interpretation of a test sentence and cannot readily distinguish dispreferred from illicit interpretations.…”

Section: The Delay Of Principle B Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Equal Treatment for All Antecedents: How Children Succeed with Principle B

et al. 2009

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Children have repeatedly been found to exhibit Principle B violations, with some reports that these violations occur only with nonquantified antecedents. This quantificational asymmetry (QA) in the delay of Principle B effect (DPBE) has been taken as support for a theory that restricts the scope of binding theory to bound variable anaphora (Reinhart 1983). However, the QA has been challenged, on the basis of discrepant findings and methodological concerns (Elbourne 2005). Here, we resolve the status of the QA with 3 studies and a review of over 30 previous studies. Using improved experimental materials, we show that children disallow local pronoun binding with both referential and quantificational antecedents when Principle B is at issue (Experiment 1), but not when Principle B is neutralized (Experiment 2). When methodological flaws are reintroduced, we replicate the QA (Experiment 3). Drawing on evidence from adult language processing, we suggest that the role of Principle B as a filter on representations during sentence understanding, in concert with pragmatic infelicities in the tasks used, accounts for the wide variability in the DPBE in the literature.

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“…Recollect too that children seem to use non-reflexive pronouns readily as Anaphors in the same way. Indeed, in Solan's (1987) experiments, four to six-year-olds interpreted English non-reflexive pronouns as ' free' Pronominals on average only 34 % of the time. Thus in both pidgin and Creole languages and in child language we find properties typical of B-first languages.…”

Section: O N C L U S I O N Smentioning

confidence: 98%

“…They also draw attention to the parallels in language acquisition. Studies by Solan (1987), Jakubowicz (1984) and others show that while the clausemate restriction on the interpretation of reflexives (in languages that have them) is acquired early, the Principle B non-reflexive use of pronouns is much more uncertainly 137 acquired, with sometimes as many as 50 % of four to six-year-olds finding a clausemate co-reference between an NP and a non-reflexive pronoun possible (Solan, 1987). As Carden and Stewart point out this finding is surprising in the light of the apparent rareness of languages that permit the reflexive use of ordinary clausemate pronouns.…”

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confidence: 99%

Pragmatic reduction of the Binding Conditions revisited

Levinson

1991

J. Ling.

147

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In an earlier article (Levinson, 1987b), I raised the possibility that a Gricean theory of implicature might provide a systematic partial reduction of the Binding Conditions; the briefest of outlines is given in Section 2.1 below but the argumentation will be found in the earlier article. In this article I want, first, to show how that account might be further justified and extended, but then to introduce a radical alternative. This alternative uses the same pragmatic framework, but gives an account better adjusted to some languages. Finally, I shall attempt to show that both accounts can be combined by taking a diachronic perspective. The attraction of the combined account is that, suddenly, many facts about long-range reflexives and their associated logophoricity fall into place

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Parameter Setting and the Development of Pronouns and Reflexives

Cited by 31 publications

References 4 publications

Morphological transparency and the Delay of Principle B Effect

Morphological transparency and the Delay of Principle B Effect

Equal Treatment for All Antecedents: How Children Succeed with Principle B

Pragmatic reduction of the Binding Conditions revisited

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