Missing Subjects in Early Child Language

The marriage of linguistic theory and language acquisition is approaching its golden anniversary. In her 1966 dissertation Ursula Bellugi provided a transformational analysis of the development of negation in English-speaking children. On the model of the Standard Theory of Generative Grammar (Chomsky 1965), she proposed a system of phrase structure and transformational rules to describe the various stages of negation and the transitions from one stage to the next. Following Bellugi’s seminal work, various studies provided transformational analyses of other aspects of child grammar (Bloom 1970; Klima and Bellugi 1966; Brown and Fraser 1964; Brown et al. 1964; Brown 1973 among others). In keeping with the goals of generative grammar, these studies attempted to provide an explicit procedure for generating all and only the utterances produced by children in a specific age range or with respect to a specific aspect of grammar. While acknowledging that children’s early utterances were more or less reduced versions of the adult target – “telegraphic” as characterized by Brown and Fraser (1964)—the descriptive focus was on the categories and combinations that the child reliably produced, rather than what he failed to produce or produced only probabilistically. Fast forward 20 some odd years, it had become increasingly apparent that the “telegraphic” child’s two and three word utterances belie a far richer and more abstract grammatical system. His language shows grammatical dependencies such as agreement (Hyams 1983, 1986; Guasti 1993/1994; Poeppel and Wexler 1993), case (Babyonyshev 1993; Schütze 1996), and verb movement (Pierce 1992; Verrips and Weissenborn 1992 among others), hence a sensitivity to the grammatical function of nouns and to the tense and aspect of verbs. The focus of generative acquisition research into early development shifted from the description of what