Acquisition of Language Particular Properties Under Impoverished Input

Multiple nominative case (MNC) and scrambling are two of the most controversial syntactic phenomena in the study of Korean grammar. This thesis investigates the two syntactic properties from a learnability perspective. It is a common assumption in language acquisition research that the language input available to the child is fully representative of the adult grammar, providing samples of all the relevant properties possible in the adult grammar. That seems to be true for some well-known properties such as wh-movement or null subjects. English-learning children receive wh-questions over 40% of the time (Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977)), and Korean children are provided with sentences with null subjects at a rate of 50–80% (Kim (2002)). Multiple nominative case and scrambling, however, present a challenge to this general picture. Longitudinal data on Korean reveal that positive evidence for MNC and scrambling is extremely rare, presenting a poverty-of-stimulus situation. This raises a learnability question: how do Korean children acquire those language particular properties under impoverished input? The thesis explores the question by examining both child speech and parental input, as well as considering competing syntactic theories of MNC and scrambling. Drawing on spontaneous speech data and acquisitional implications of the syntactic theories of MNC and scrambling, acquisitional hypotheses are constructed and tested experimentally. The results demonstrate that in order to acquire MNC and scrambling, children must use some prior knowledge specific to language, supporting the tenet of the principles and parameters theory of language acquisition. The thesis starts with an introductory chapter in which previous acquisitional findings are discussed concerning the question of whether input frequency plays