Knowledge and Obedience: The Developmental Status of the Binding Theory

There is a widespread view concerning the acquisition of binding, which holds that young children do not have knowledge of Principle B of the binding theory (BT) (see Lust (1986) for a review). In this article we challenge this position. We argue that the evidence merely shows that children do not reliably obey Principle B. It does not show that they do not know it. Where the evidence makes it possible to disentangle knowledge from obedience, it is possible to show that children do know Principle B, and probably obey it whenever other more pressing concerns do not interfere with their performance. The issue of whether children have knowledge of Principle B is a central one for theoretical research into language acquisition. The overall conclusion of linguistic research into the binding theory has been that its principles are essentially universal, with room for parametric variation (for instance, in the domain of binding; see Manzini and Wexler (1987)). The most straightforward developmental interpretation is thus that children are innately endowed with the necessary knowledge and should show command of the binding theory from the beginning. A number of acquisition studies, however, have concluded that children will violate Principles B and/or C some significant percentage of the time. They have also concluded that children follow the dictates of Principle B later than they follow those of Principle A, and this has led researchers to propose that Principle B is acquired, or develops, later. One kind of response to this puzzle maintains the standard grammatical theory and