Organisers: Anna Gavarró (UAB) & Maria Teresa Guasti (U. Milano-Bicocca)
Invited
speaker: CARSON SCHÜTZE (UCLA)
PROGRAMME
In recent years a clearer picture of language acquisition
has been emerging: while some parameterised features of grammar are fixed
early on (for example, those granting word order), other phenomena
constitute systematic departures of child grammar from adult grammar
(resulting, for example, in periods of apparent optionality).
In this workshop we will consider the expression of
number. The values that the number feature may take is a source of variation
across languages and number features materialise in structurally diverse
configurations. Number may be involved in agreement between subject and
verb, agreement between object and verb, number contrasts of clitic
pronouns, agreement between Ns and As within NP, agreement between articles
and Ns within DP, number contrasts of determiners (in languages without
articles), and expression of quantificational determiners (e.g. Three
dogs are barking). Recent accounts of the latter suggest that children
distinguish between numbers and other quantificational determiners and that
numbers elicit some kind of interpretation more easily than other
quantificational determiners; in this respect it is interesting that certain
languages do not have a full range of number words. In general, while the
realisation and distribution of number varies cross-linguistically, it is a
quite robust dimension of many languages, including creoles. If a number
feature is universally available to the child, we may ask as to the way in
which it appears in any given language.
In this workshop we set out to investigate if the
development of number(s) is homogeneous across child languages or not, and,
if it is not, which are the factors determining the variation: phonological
factors, e.g. related to the possibly affixal character of number,
syntactic-semantic factors, e.g. related to the (un)interpretable character of
the feature), or factors strictly related to the computational system, e.g. whereby the maturation of certain principles may bring with them delay in
the emergence of a feature. We aim also at exploring how children learn
number words, amongst other quantification expressions, and their
interpretative properties.
Questions concerning the workshop must be sent to
cg.acquisition@uab.es.
