On the Relation between Input Frequency and Acquisition Patterns from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

nouns display another argument against a universal DP. They cannot usually be combined with a possessive. As the position for an overt possessive is SpecDP (Valois 1991), the absence of DP would again provide an explanation. Note also that a definite or indefinite article is not allowed in these constructions. (12) a. Maria hat Recht. lit. “Mary has right. “ 2 Note, however, that the use of hans/deras “his/their” to mean sin/sina has become very common in Spoken Swedish, especially among younger speakers. b. *Maria hat ihr Recht. lit. “Mary has her right. “ (13) a. Maria hat Hunger. lit. “Mary has hunger. ” b. *Maria hat ihren Hunger. lit. “Mary has her hunger. ” (14) a. Maria hat gute Laune. lit. “Mary has good mood. ” b. *Maria hat ihre gute Laune. lit. “Mary has her good mood. ” In short, there is abundant evidence justifying that nominals do not always project to the DP-level. One may now further hypothesize that children initially follow principles of economy assuming that NP is the maximal projection for a noun. Roeper (1999) defines constraints on child language in terms of Economy of Representation (Chomsky (1995)). Accordingly, less structure and short movement are preferred over more structure and long movement if there is an option. “Whatever is a universal requirement of all languages cannot be omitted. Therefore each claim of minimalism must be defended. For instance, if Determiner Phrases are universally present above Noun Phrases, then they should not be omitted, but if languages allow NP to occur by itself [. this . ] should be the first hypothesis. ” (Roeper 1999: 177). This hypothesis is not inconsistent with the Variation Model, if we assume that the weights of GNP and GDP are initially set to a default value (pNP = 1, pDP = 0). Another intuitive point in favour of the NP-option concerns the Configurational Hypothesis (Giorgi & Longobardi 1991:2). In stating that the structure of nominals parallels clause structure this idea played an important role when the DP-hypothesis was advanced. As for clauses, the left periphery is argued to have a complex structure, containing FinP and ForceP (Rizzi 1997). However, this complex structure may also be absent in some complement clauses, such as small clauses. If the parallel between clauses and nominals holds, the latter should not necessarily project the DP-layer. In sum, there are a lot of arguments against a universal DP that is always projected. I will therefore depart from the assumption that NP and DP constitute possible representations for nominals in UG. 4. Determiner placement in the target-systems This section deals with determiner omission in child-directed speech by adult speakers of French, Italian, and German. Simplifying, one may assume that each nominal syntagma that contains overtly realized material above NP leads to an increase of pDP. It remains open whether the child can distinguish between nouns with a specific reading (projecting DP) and nouns with non-specific reading (not projecting DP). For the moment, suppose that the child considers all nouns to be specific by default, with or without an article. The portion of bare nouns is illustrated in Figure 1, which summarizes an investigation based on corpora of child directed speech containing between 2500 and 2700 nominal expressions per language. Proper names, compound nouns, and the expressions faire mal, fare male “hurt” are not included among the group of bare nouns. The penalty probabilities of the grammar competing with GDP differ significantly (p<0.001) between each language pair (French/ Italian: χ=56.83, df=1, N=5051; Italian/ German: χ=36.22, df=1, N=5186). 0,06 0,12 0,18 0,94 0,88 0,82 French Italian German BN (%)