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ACQUISTION OF VERB PLACEMENT IN HEAD-FINAL
LANGUAGE: EVIDENCE FROM NEGATION AND QUANTIFIER SCOPE IN KOREAN
Chung-hye Han
(Joint work with Jeffrey Lidz, Northwestern University; Julien Musolino, Indiana
University)
Simon Fraser University
Friday, February 11, 3:30 PM, MJH Room 126
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Program
In a head final language, verb-raising is hard to detect since there is no evidence
from the string to support a raising analysis. This is so both for children
acquiring the language and for linguists developing an analysis of it. If the
language has a clitic-like negation that associates with the verb in syntax, then
scope facts concerning negation and a quantified object NP could provide evidence
regarding the height of the verb. Even so, such facts are rare, especially in the
input to children and so we might be led to expect that not all speakers exposed to
a head-final language acquire the same grammar as far as verb-raising is concerned.
In this talk, we present evidence supporting this expectation. Using experimental
data concerning the scope of quantified NPs and negation in Korean, we show that
there are two populations of Korean speakers: one with verb-raising and one without.
We will also introduce data from Japanese that lead to a similar conclusion. Our
work is consistent with the claims from the diachronic syntax literature (Kroch
1989, Pintzuk 1991, Santorini 1992, Taylor 1994) and recent developments in the
theory of language acquisition (Roeper 1999, Yang 2003) that even given the
restricted hypothesis space determined by Universal Grammar, insufficient input can
lead to distinct grammars in a single population.
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