Speaker: Núria Bosch (University of Cambridge)
Title: Not all topics are equal: syntactic complexity and its effect on the acquisition of left-peripheral structures
Time: Tuesday, November 5, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Approaches to the acquisition of functional categories, particularly maturational approaches, havetypically focused on theorising putatively universal aspects of development, e.g., universally delayed development of CP-structures (i.a., Radford 1990; Rizzi 1993/4; Friedmann et al. 2021). In this talk, I highlight the empirical reality and theoretical significance of systematic crosslinguistically variableacquisition orders of CP-structures. I present a two-part empirical argument against rigidly pre-wired developmental pathways, drawing in particular on bilingual and monolingual acquisition of topicalization structures.
§1. I summarise two (ongoing) corpus studies on seven Germanic-Romance bilinguals acquiring Italian-Dutch, Italian-German and Spanish-German. Study 1 examines the order of acquisition of CP-structures. Study 2 is a supplementary study on the development of cliticization that investigates its interlinking (or lack thereof) with the emergence of Clitic-Left Dislocation in Romance. The data reveals several consequential patterns: among others, CP-structures systematically emerge early, irrespective of structural height; and secondly, the acquisition of topics reveals language-specific discrepancies (Germanic topics vs Romance CLLD). These results are incompatible with bottom-up maturation, and extant approaches that could accommodate the data (continuity, inward maturation) prove insufficiently predictive on their own. I develop a neo-emergentist generative account of the patterns (Biberauer, 2011, et seq.; Biberauer & Roberts, 2015) and propose that L1-specific mismatches in the acquisition of topics systematically track the formal, parametric complexity of the topicalization strategies in the relevant L1.
§2. Our predictions are, then, tested against data on monolingual acquisition of topics from a range of 10+ typologically-diverse languages. I show that the development of topics (early vs late) systematically varies as a function of the formal complexity of each L1s topicalization strategies (e.g., A/A properties of topics, operator/non-operator topics).
These results have several ramifications for requirements on theories of functional category acquisition and for the crosslinguistic flexibility of learning paths more broadly. Critically, I conclude that late topics reported in some maturational work (e.g., Friedmann et al., 2021; Meira & Grolla, 2023; and references therein) are an epiphenomenon of the L1s studied, not of universal maturational constraints on the CP.