The Question of Root Infinitives in Early Child Greek

Institute for Research in Cognitive Science The Question of Root Infinitives in Early Child Greek

The Question of Root In � nitives in Early Child Greek �

The semantic and aspectual properties of child L 2 root infinitives

One of the objectives of investigating child second language acquisition (SLA) is to find out to what extent it is similar to first language (L1) acquisition. Assuming that L1 acquisition is guided by principles of Universal Grammar (UG), it is often thought that second language (L2) acquisition by children is of the same nature, as it seems so easy for young learners to acquire a foreign langu...

The Aorist Infinitives in -εειν in Early Greek Hexameter Poetry

This paper examines the distribution of thematic infinitive endings in early Greek epic in the context of the long-standing debate about the transmission and development of Homeric epic diction. There are no aorist infinitives in -έμεν in Homer which would scan as ᴗ ᴗ − before a consonant or caesura (for example *βαλέμεν): instead we find unexplained forms in -έειν (for example βαλέειν). It is ...

Early operators and late topic-drop/pro-drop

This paper compares two reduction principles in child language, Tense/Agreement Omission (Schütze 1997, Wexler 1998) and Root Peripheral Truncation (Rizzi 1994, 2001). The paper argues that the empirical content of these proposals as well as their partial overlap follows from an inherent hierarchy of acquisition steps of the kind predicted in Jakobson (1942). The empirical support for this rein...