The Underlying Position of External Arguments in French: A Study in Adult and Child Grammar

In this article I argue in favor of a parameter ordering Spec VP with respect to V. After dealing with some adult phenomena, the study concentrates on early child French. Adopting Spec VP as the basic subject position, I show that some particular restrictions imposed on French Stylistic Inversion can be derived by assuming Spec VP to be right branching; these restrictions then follow from the typical linear adjacency requirement on Case assignment under government. Developmental data provide robust evidence for the right-branching Spec VP hypothesis, as children at around 2 years massively produce VOS utterances (and never VSO). Other sequences of constituents (e.g., (negation) - V[-finite]-subject) are also shown to favor a right-branching Spec VP hypothesis. The differences between the child and adult systems are treated as follows: The adjacency requirement is not compulsory at the relevant developmental stage, and the availability of an empty category to fill Spec IP is generalized. Finally, related p...

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