Andrew Radford

• University of Essex

This paper examines the syntax of clauses in which prepositions undergo Swiping/Sluice-Stranding in elliptical questions like Who with? (e.g. in response to ‘She’s having an affair’). We begin by outlining characteristic properties of Swiping, noting that this involves an interrogative wh-constituent positioned in front of a focused preposition, an...

Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are interesting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In t...

This article investigates the nature of preposition copying and preposition pruning structures in present-day English. We begin by illustrating the two phenomena and consider how they might be accounted for in syntactic terms, and go on to explore the possibility that preposition copying and pruning arise for processing reasons.We then report on tw...

This paper reports on how adult Japanese Learners of English/JLEs acquire universal and parameterised constraints which regulate the accessibility of Goals to Wh-Movement, and which determine whether subordinate or superordinate material is pied-piped or stranded when a wh-word is moved. We present evidence that universal constraints on Goal Access...

Ann Peters' interesting paper raises a number of questions in my mind. One of these arises from have This dichotomy may be too simplistic. A number of researchers have argued over the past few years that during the OptionalInfinitives/OI stage of Wexler (1994) children may UNDERSPECIFIED functional categories. For example, Schütze & Wexler (1996) a...

This chapter provides an analysis of children's so-called ‘genitive subjects’ (like my in My want one) within the framework of Principles and Parameters Theory. Child clauses with genitive subjects have been argued to have a very different syntactic structure from their adult counterparts, viz. to be nominal rather than clausal, or VPs rather than...

This textbook provides a concise, readable introduction to contemporary work in syntactic theory, particularly to key concepts of Chomsky's minimalist programme. Andrew Radford gives a general overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive devices used in 1990s work. The discussion is largely based on data from a range of varieties of En...

Against the background of the proliferation of the various subdisciplines of language acquisition research over the past decades, this volume aims to enhance the existing but somewhat fragile links between language acquisition and theoretical linguistics. With regard to previous research, the book focuses on the acquisition of syntax and syntactic...

The purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary Government-and-Binding (GB) reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima & Bellugi's classic 1966 work on the acquisition of interrogatives. I argue that the central insight of K&B's paper can be captured by positing that wh-questions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head c...

Contemporary linguistic theories distinguish the principal element of a phrase - the 'head' - from the subordinate elements it dominates. This pervasive grammatical concept has been used to describe and account for linguistic phenomena ranging from agreement and government to word order universals, but opinions differ widely on its precise definiti...

This paper is concerned with the acquisition of the morphosyntax of finite verbs by monolingual children acquiring British English as their first language. The primary data are drawn from a large naturalistic sample of more than 100,000 early child utterances (based on the corpus of 39 cross-sectional and 94 longitudinal studies described in Radfor...

This article presents an analysis of the syntax of nominal arguments in the early patterned speech of young children natively acquiring English. The overall hypothesis is that the earliest syntactic structures they produce are purely thematic and lexical. Consequently, the earliest nominals produced by young children are thematic in nature, lacking...

University of Essex

van RiemsdijkH. and WilliamsE., Introduction to the theory of grammar. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Pp. xvi + 366. JacobsenB., Modern transformational grammar. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986. Pp. xv + 525. - Volume 24 Issue 1 - Andrew Radford

Modern Romance - with the exception of Rumanian - has a class of causative+ infinitive constructions in which the infinitive subject surfaces as an agentive, as in (1) below, where the agentive phrase is italicized: (1) (a) Il s'est fait haïr par toils. (French) He himself is made hate by all. (b) Si fece odiare da tutti. (Italian) Himself he-made...

This article is concerned with the syntax of Comparative Correlative sentences like The more you eat, the fatter you get and offers a Minimalist-Cartographic analysis which combines insights from Chomsky's (2004, 2008) work on the Minimalist Program with insights from Rizzi's (1997) Split Projection analysis of the left periphery of the clause. It...

Two-and three-year-old children generally go through a stage during which they sporadically omit possessive 's, so alternating between saying (e.g.) Daddy's car and Daddy car. At roughly the same age, children also go through a stage (referred to by Wexler 1994 as the optional infinitives stage) during which they sporadically omit the third person...

Traducción de: Transformational syntaxa estudent's guide to Chomsky's extended standard theory Incluye bibliografía e índice

University College of North Wales, Bangor