VP-Ellipsis and Anaphora in Child Language Acquisition

Abstract

In this article, we report on experiments investigating children's knowledge of the constraints on ellipsis constructions in English, focusing on subtle contrasts between verb phrase-ellipsis (VPE) and VP-anaphora (VPA). These contrasts are of theoretical interest insofar as they present an apparent learnability paradox: On one hand, the negative constraints on these constructions are underdetermined by the positive evidence available to the learner (Crain (1991)); on the other hand, languages systematically vary in the availability of VPE. Hence, it seems as if the constraints cannot be directly encoded in Universal Grammar. Our results-from 2 parallel experiments employing the same stimuli but with different methodologies-show that young children can correctly distinguish VPE from VPA, respecting the constraints on each.