Strong Continuity, UG, and the Minimalist Program: An Account of the Optional Infintive Stage in Child Language

0. Introduction The status of functional categories in early child language has been a subject of debate for much of the last decade (Hyams 1986, Radford 1990, Platzack 1992, Rizzi 1993, Wexler 1994). In general, proponents of the ‘No Functional Categories’ position claim that production data from early child language clearly demonstrates that the differences between child language and adult language can be accounted for by the lack of functional projections in the former. Proponents in favour of the existence of functional categories in early child language, on the other hand, claim that the differences between child language and adult language is to be found elsewhere in the grammar, and that the status of functional categories is essentially identical for both children and adults, assuming UG and the Continuity Hypothesis. In this paper, I argue in favour of adopting the strong syntactic continuity hypothesis (Hyams 1996) in which the child’s grammar contains the same projections as the adult grammar. By adopting this assumption, I provide a Minimalist account of the child language data. I claim that the evidence from early child language supports a Minimalist position whereby children possess all the functional categories which comprise adult grammar. This position allows us to maintain a strong version of the continuity hypothesis while providing an account of the child data.