Subject-Object Asymmetries in the Acquisition of Clefts

A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that movement of objects is more difficult than movement of subjects. This asymmetry has been most frequently observed with relative clauses (de Villiers et al. 1979, Correa 1995, Friedmann and Novogrodski 2004, Adani 2011, Guasti et al. 2012, a.o), but has also been reported, to a lesser extent, with wh-questions (Tyack and Ingram 1977, Stromswold 1995, Philip et al. 2000) and clefts (Bever 1979, Lempert and Kinsbourne 1980, Hirsch and Wexler 2006). This asymmetry is not straightforwardly predicted by syntactic theories of movement, according to which A-bar dependencies can be established while skipping over elements that do not have properties directly relevant to that particular A-bar operation. For instance, the NP the dog in (1) is taken to be irrelevant for the computation of the wh-dependency, since it is not a wh-phrase and cannot participate in whquestion formation to begin with (see e.g. Rizzi 1990).