Partial Constraint Ordering in Child French Syntax

Abstract

Reanalyzing production data from three French children, we make two basic points. First, we show that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition (in child French). Tense production starts and ends at near-adult levels, but suffers a "dip" in production in the intermediate stage. Agreement develops linearly, going roughly from none to 100% over the same time. This profile suggests an analysis in which tense and agreement compete at the intermediate stage. Second, using a mechanism of grammatical development based on partial rankings of constraints (in terms of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993)), our analysis successfully models, over three stages, the frequency with which children use tensed, agreeing, and nonfinite verbs.