The Acquisition of Preposition Stranding
and its Theoretical Implications*
Koji Sugisaki
MIE UNIVERISTY

1.

Introduction
An impressive number of language acquisition studies conducted within the

Principles and Parameters approach to UG have made at least two major
findings. One group of studies revealed that various principles of UG constrain
the course of acquisition from virtually the very beginning of life (e.g. Otsu
1981, Crain and Thornton 1998), and a different group of studies demonstrated
that even children’s “errors” fall under the range of possible human languages
determined by parameters (e.g. Hyams 1986, McDaniel et al. 1995, Thornton
2004). In making these findings, the contribution was mainly from theoreticalstudies to the study of child language, in that the role of the latter was limited toproviding supporting evidence to the former. Yet, recent vast progress in both ofthese fields further tightened the connection between theoretical analyses andacquisition research, and enables us to make the opposite contribution. In thisstudy, I will summarize some of my own works on the acquisition of preposition
stranding and of pied-piping to illustrate how the investigations of childlanguage can contribute to the study of syntax. More specifically, I will
demonstrate that the time course of the acquisition of these properties has thepotential to differentiate among the competing syntactic proposals concerning (i)the nature of the preposition-stranding parameter and (ii) the derivation ofswiping construction (Merchant 2002).

2.

The Parameter of Preposition Stranding: A View from Child
Language
From a cross-linguistic perspective, the possibility of preposition stranding

illustrated in (1) is among the more exotic properties of English. The productive
use of preposition/postposition stranding (hereafter, P-stranding) with
A′-movement is attested only in some of the Germanic languages and in African
languages of the Kru family, such as English, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian,Swedish, and Gbadi (Maling 1977, van Riemsdijk 1978, Koopman 1984). In
many other languages, obligatory pied-piping of prepositions is required, as
illustrated by the French examples in (3).

(1) English: Which subject have you talked about t ?
(2) Gbadi (Koopman 1984:54):táбlĒ1

yI

wa

kÉ

table

WH

they

FUT-A-FOC food

-lÒ

līlÈ

t1

on

‘It is the table they will put the food on.’(3) French:a. * Quel
which

sujet

as-tu

parlé

subject

have-you talked

de

t?

about

‘Which subject have you talked about?’
b.

De

quel

sujet

as-tu

parlé

about

which

subject

have-you talked

klÚ jIlEt?

put

In light of such cross-linguistic variation, many attempts have been made to
determine what parameters are crucially relevant for the availability of thismarked property (Abels 2003, Bošković 2001, Herslund 1984, Hornstein andWeinberg 1981, Kayne 1981, 1984, Law 1998, 2006, Maling 1977, vanRiemsdijk 1978, Salles 1997, Stowell 1981, 1982, among many others). In thissection, I will evaluate two of these approaches with the data from theacquisition of English and French. Evidence from child language lends support
to Stowell’s (1981, 1982) parametric proposal that the availability of P-stranding
should be tightly connected to the availability of transitive verb-particle
construction, and argues against the proposals by Law (1998, 2006) and Salles(1997) which relate the lack of P-stranding in Romance to the existence of
suppletive forms of prepositions and determiners.１

2.1 P-stranding and the Transitive Verb-Particle Construction２
In a pre-minimalist framework, Stowell (1981, 1982) proposed that
preposition-stranding is possible only in languages that permit the V-Particle-NP
construction (and postposition-stranding, only in languages with the
NP-Particle-V construction). Stowell adopts the assumption from Hornstein andWeinberg (1981) that there is a UG constraint which dictates that Reanalysis
must apply in the syntax in order for P-stranding to be possible. Reanalysis is anoperation that creates a complex verb from a verb and a preposition. According
to Stowell, the verb-particle combination provides a ‘template’ for the complex
verb created by the Reanalysis operation. If a language has a transitive
verb-particle construction with the order verb + particle as in (4a), then thatcombination provides a template to reanalyze the verb and the prepositional
head of the following PP into a single complex verb. Similarly, if a language

contains a verb-particle construction with the order particle + verb as in (4b),then that combination provides a template to reanalyze the verb and the
postpositional head of the preceding PP into a single complex verb.
(4)

verb-particle

Reanalysisa.

[V V + Prt] :V [PP P NP]→ [V V + P] NPb.

[V Prt + V] :[PP NP P] V→

NP [V P + V]

Since English permits the verb-particle construction with the order verb +particle, as shown in (5), this language is allowed to reanalyze the verb and the
prepositional head of the following PP. Hence, ‘preposition-stranding’ ispossible. In Dutch, the verb-particle construction has the order particle + verb as
shown in (6), and thus Dutch allows the reanalysis of the verb and the head of
the preceding postpositional phrase. Hence, ‘postposition-stranding’ is possiblein Dutch as illustrated in (7b), even though its possibility is very limited,
compared to English.

(5) John should pick up the book.
(6) … omdat
becauseJan

mijn broer

op

belde

John

my brotherupcalled(van Riemsdijk 1978: 91)(7) a.

Zij

probeert

she

tries

[PP er
there‘She is trying to climb into it.’in] te klimmen.
into climb

b.

Waar1

probeert

where

tries

t1

in

te klimmen?

into climb‘Where is she trying to climb into?’(Stowell 1982: 249)

As Baltin and Postal (1996) discuss in detail, Reanalysis operation faces a
number of empirical problems. In addition, it is not clear whether such operation
can be maintained in the current Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995).
However, the fundamental part of Stowell’s proposal seems to be on the righttrack. Our cross-linguistic survey suggests that P-stranding is in fact permitted
only in those languages that allow transitive verb-particle construction.

(8) A Cross-linguistic survey:
P-stranding?
(I-E) North Germanic:
Icelandic:
Norwegian:Swedish:Danish:(I-E) West Germanic:
English:Dutch:
Frisian:Afrikaans
GermanNiger-Congo:
Bete-Gbadi:
Vata:
Afro-Asiatic:
Hebrew:
Altaic:Turkish:Transitive Verb-Particles?

YES
YES
YES
YES

YES
YES
YES
YES

YES
LimitedLimitedLimited
NO

YES
YES
YES
YES
YES

YES
YES

YES
YES

NO

NO

NO

NO

Japanese-Korean:
Japanese:(I-E) Greek:
Greek:(I-E) Romance:
French:Spanish:Italian:(I-E) Slavic:
Bulgarian:Russian:
Serbo-Croatian:
Isolate:Basque:

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO
NO
NO

NO
NO
NO

NO
NO
NO

NO
NO
NO

NO

NO

If Stowell’s parametric proposal is correct in arguing that the transitive
verb-particle construction constitutes one of the prerequisites for P-stranding, itis predicted that children learning English should never acquire P-stranding
significantly earlier than the V-Particle-NP construction. In order to evaluate
this prediction, Sugisaki and Snyder (2002) analyzed ten longitudinal corpora
from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000), which provided a total
sample of more than 124,000 lines of child speech.
For each child we began by locating the first clear uses of (a) a
V-Particle-NP construction, (b) a direct-object wh-question, (c) a wh-question ora null-operator construction with preposition-stranding. The CLAN program
Combo, together with a complete file of English prepositions and of English
particles, was used to identify potentially relevant child utterances, which werethen searched by hand and checked against the original transcripts to exclude
imitations, repetitions, and formulaic routines.

(9) Corpora analyzed:
Child
Abe
Adam
Allison
April
Eve
Naomi
Nina
Peter
Sarah
Shem

Collected by
Kuczaj (1976)
Brown (1973)
Bloom (1973)
Higginson (1985)
Brown (1973)
Sachs (1973)
Suppes (1973)
Bloom (1970)
Brown (1973)
Clark (1978)

Age Span
2;04 – 5;00
2;03 – 4;10
1;04 – 2;10
1;10 – 2;11
1;06 – 2;03
1;02 – 4;09
1;11 – 3;03
1;09 – 3;01
2;03 – 5;01
2;02 – 3;02

# Child Utterances
4,214
9,253
2,192
2,321
12,473
16,634
22,957
24,422
20,787
9,178

The results were as follows. Among the ten children, eight of themacquired

V-Particle-NP

constructions,direct-object

wh-questions,andP-stranding by the end of their corpora. Following Stromswold (1996) and
Snyder (2007), the age at which a child produced his or her first clear example
of a construction was considered to be the age of acquisition for thisconstruction. Mean age of acquisition for V-Particle-NP construction was 2;03.
Mean age of acquisition for P-stranding was 2;07. Thus, the mean age ofacquisition

for

the

V-Particle-NP

construction

wasearlier

than

preposition-stranding by about 4 months. To evaluate the statistical significanceof an observed age-difference between the acquisition of the V-Particle-NP
construction and the acquisition of P-stranding, we began at the child's first
direct-object wh-question. (We reasoned that it was appropriate to look for awh-question with P-stranding only when the child was already using
wh-movement in simple, direct-object questions.) We then counted the numberof clear uses of the earlier construction (either V-Particle-NP or P-stranding)
before the first clear use of the later construction. Next we calculated the relativefrequency of the two constructions in the child’s own speech, starting with thetranscript after the first use of the later construction, and continuing for a total offour transcripts or through the end of the corpus (whichever came first). Finally
we used the Binomial Test to obtain the probability of sampling the observed
number of tokens of the earlier construction simply by chance, before the firstuse of the later construction, under the null hypothesis that both became
available concurrently and had the same relative probability of use as in latertranscripts (Stromswold 1996, Snyder 2007).
Results of the statistical analysis were as follows. Six of the eight children
acquired the V-Particle-NP construction significantly earlier than P-stranding,by Binomial Test (Eve, Naomi, Nina, Peter, Sarah, Shem). The remaining two
childrenacquiredthe

V-Particle-NP construction

andP-strandingatapproximately the same age (no significant difference, by Binomial Test).
Crucially, no child in our study acquired P-stranding significantly earlier thanthe V-Particle-NP construction. These findings from child English lend support
to Stowell’s parametric proposal that languages permitting P-stranding are aproper subset of those permitting transitive verb-particle construction: Since UG
excludes the grammar that allows P-stranding but disallows verb-particles,
English-leaning children never exhibit an intermediate stage in which only
P-stranding is permitted.

2.2. Obligatory Pied-piping and the Suppletive Forms of Prepositions andDeterminers３
The parametric proposal by Stowell (1981, 1982) discussed in the previous
section attempted to explain why P-stranding is permitted in English. In contrast,
Law (1998, 2006) and Salles (1997) proposed an account for why prepositions

are obligatorily pied-piped in a number of languages. More specifically, theyargue that the lack of P-stranding in French and other Romance languages canbe attributed to an independent morphological property of these languages: A
preposition sometimes coalesces with the following determiner into a suppletive
form (henceforth, P+D suppletive forms). The relevant examples are given in(10) - (13).

(10) French (Law 1998:226):
Jean

a

parlé

Jean

have talked

du

sujet

le

about-the subject

plus

difficile.

the most

difficult‘Jean talked about the most difficult subject.’(11) Italian (Law 1998:227):
Giannihaparlato

Giannihave talkeddelsogettopiùdifficile.

about-thesubject

mostdifficult‘Gianni talked about the most difficult subject.’(12) Portuguese (Salles 1997):
a

volta

the returnao

Brasilto-theBrasil(13) German (Law 1998:227):
Hans

war amSchalter.

Hans

was by-the

counter‘Hans was by the counter.’

Building on their cross-linguistic survey summarized in (14), Law andSalles postulate the generalization that if a language has P+D suppletive forms,
then pied-piping of prepositions (P-pied-piping) is obligatory. In other words,they propose that the existence of P+D suppletive forms in a given language
constitutes a sufficient condition for obligatory P-pied-piping.

(14) Cross-linguistic survey:
Obligatory
P+D suppletive forms?
Romance:
French:Italian:
Portuguese:
Germanic:
German:EnglishScandinavian languages:

P-pied-piping?

YES
YES
YES

YES
YES
YES

YES
NO
NO

YES
NO
NO

In order to account for this cross-linguistic generalization, Law (1998,
2006) postulates the parameter and the principle given in (15) and (16),respectively. Romance languages in general (and German) take the positive
value of the parameter in (15), while English and Scandinavian languages takeits negative setting. If the positive value is chosen, the head of DP in that
language always incorporates into P, as shown in (17).

(15) Parameter of D-to-P incorporation:
A language {has, does not have} D-to-P incorporation.
(16) Syntactic constraint on suppletion (Law 1998:227):
Elements that undergo suppletive rules must form a syntactic unit X0.

(17) D-to-P incorporation:
PP
P ei DP
ty
ru
P
D
t
NP

Given the constraint in (16), only those languages that have the positive
setting of the relevant parameter are permitted to have P+D suppletive forms.
Languages with the negative setting do not allow adjunction of the D head to P,
and hence never satisfy the constraint on the application of suppletive rules
stated in (16). In other words, the availability of P+D suppletive forms in a given
language is an indication that the language has the setting which dictates that D
must incorporate into P in the structure (17).
The obligatory P-pied-piping in Romance languages also follows from thepositive setting of the parameter in (15). If we assume that wh-words are Ds,
then languages with the positive value require that wh-words in the complementof P should undergo adjunction to P. Under this situation, the minimal phrasal
category that contains the wh-word is PP, and hence the wh-movement to thespecifier of CP results in P-pied-piping. On the other hand, in languages with thenegative value, there is no incorporation of the wh-word to P, and thus thewh-word can move to the specifier of CP without pied-piping the prepositional
head. The relevant derivations are schematically shown in (18) and (19).

(18) Languages with the positive setting:

[CP

[IP

… [VP …

[PP P+D[DP t

about + whichNP]] ]]]

topic(19) Languages with the negative setting:

[CP

[IP

… [VP …

[PP P
about

[DP

D

NP ]

]]]]

which topic

In sum, under Law’s parametric system, the existence of P+D suppletive
forms in a given language is a reflection of the positive setting of the parameterin (15) that induces obligatory D-to-P incorporation, and this obligatory D-to-P
incorporation is the trigger for obligatory pied-piping of prepositions withwh-movements.
The analyses by Law (1998, 2006) and Salles (1997) argue that, in every
language that has such suppletive forms, D-incorporation to P is obligatory andhence pied-piping of prepositions is required. In acquisitional terms, theiranalysessuggest

that

the

only

language-particularknowledgethat

French-learning children need to acquire in order to induce obligatory
P-pied-piping is (i) the knowledge about the availability of P+D suppletive
forms and (ii) the knowledge about overt wh-movement. This should lead to thefollowing prediction for acquisition: A French-learning child should exhibit
P-pied-piping as soon as she acquires P+D suppletive forms and overt
wh-movement.
In order to evaluate this prediction, Isobe and Sugisaki (2002) analyzed two
longitudinal corpora for French in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000).

(20) Corpora analyzed:
Child
Grégoire
Philippe

Collected byChampaud
Suppes et al. (1974)

Age Span
1;09 – 2;05
2;01 – 3;03

# Child Utterances
3,237
13,739For each child, we began by locating the first clear uses of (a) an overt
wh-movement of que ‘what’ or qui ‘who’ from a complement position, (b) awh-question with pied-piping, and (c) a P+D suppletive form. To count as aclear use, we required the P+D suppletive form to appear after verbs, nouns, or
adjectives that take a PP complement, thereby eliminating the possibility that thechild is using the relevant form as a pure determiner. The age of acquisition was
taken as the first clear use, followed soon after by additional uses (Stromswold
1996, Snyder 2007). The CLAN program Combo, together with complete filesof wh-words and P+D suppletive forms in French, was used to identify
potentially relevant utterances, which were then searched by hand and checkedagainst the original transcripts to exclude imitations, repetitions, and formulaic
routines.
The results were as follows. One child (Philippe) acquired direct-object
wh-questions, wh-questions with pied-piping, and P+D suppletive forms by theend of his corpus. He acquired direct-object wh-questions at the age of 2;2, P+D
suppletive forms at the age of 2;2, wh-questions with pied-piping at the age of
2;6. To evaluate the statistical significance of observed age-differences between
acquisition of P-pied-piping and acquisition of P+D suppletive forms in Philippe,
we began at the first overt wh-movement, and then counted the number of clear
uses of the earlier construction before the first clear use of a later construction.
We next calculated the relative frequency of the two constructions in the child’s
own speech, starting with the transcript after the first use of the later

construction, and continuing through the end of the corpus. We then used a
Binomial Test to obtain the probability of sampling the observed number oftoken of the earlier construction simply by chance, before the first clear use of
the later construction, under the null hypothesis that both became available
concurrently and had the same relative probability of use as in later transcripts(Stromswold 1996, Snyder 2007).
The results of the statistical analysis revealed that the age-discrepancy
between the P+D suppletive form and P-pied-piping was statistically significant(p < .05, by Binomial Test). This indicates that Philippe acquired P-pied-piping
significantly later than overt wh-movement and P+D suppletion, contrary to theprediction from the parametric proposal by Law (1998, 2006) and Salles (1997).
Our findings from the acquisition of French directly contradict Law-Salles’sview that the existence of P+D suppletive forms in a given language constitutes
a sufficient condition for the obligatory pied-piping of prepositions. One child in
our study clearly exhibited a grammar that permitted both overt wh-movement
and P+D suppletion but did not permit P-pied-piping. Our results are compatible
only with an analysis in which the availability of P+D suppletive forms is anecessary condition for pied-piping. Yet, such an analysis would be far fromappealing, given that it permits adult grammars that have P+D suppletive forms
but still permit P-stranding. Hence, evidence from child French argues against
the view that the parameter of P-stranding should relate the lack of preposition
stranding to the existence of suppletive forms of prepositions and determiners.４

2.3 Interim Summary
In this section, we have shown that the time course of acquisition isconsistent with Stowell’s (1981, 1982) parametric proposal that the parameter ofP-stranding should create an implicational relationship between P-stranding andtransitive verb-particle construction, but is inconsistent with the parametric viewby Law (1998, 2006) and Salles (1997) that the lack of preposition stranding
should be connected to the existence of suppletive forms of prepositions anddeterminers. Even though a minimalist reformulation of the P-stranding
parameter that can capture these observations is a remaining issue, thesefindings severely restrict the range of possible parametric analyses, and hence
demonstrate that the time course of acquisition is potentially an important
ground to evaluate parametric proposals.

3.

The Syntax of Swiping: A View from Child Language５
In this section, we shift our focus to a different construction in English,

which has surface similarity to P-stranding. It has been observed at least since
Ross (1969) and Rosen (1976) that English allows a peculiar type of elliptical
wh-questions that can be found only under sluicing, in which the wh-object ofthe preposition appears not after the preposition but before it, as illustrated in(21). Merchant (2002) calls this construction Swiping (sluiced wh-wordinversion with prepositions in Northern Germanic).

(21) a.

John fixed it, but I don’t remember what with.

b.

John was talking, but I don’t remember who to.

Since the recent minimalist analysis by Merchant (2002), this phenomenon
has gained much attention, and two major types of analysis have been proposedin the syntactic literature. One approach (Merchant 2002; see also van
Craenenbroeck 2004) argues that swiping crucially involves pied-piping ofprepositions in its derivation, while the other approach (Hasegawa 2006, Kim
1997, Nakao and Yoshida 2006; see also Richards 2001) claims that swiping isderived through P-stranding. In this section, I will summarize the findings of
Sugisaki (2008) to demonstrate that the time course of the acquisition has thepotential to differentiate between these two competing approaches.

3.1. Two Approaches to Swiping
One of the fundamental characteristics of swiping is that, at least in English,
only a limited variety of wh-expressions can occur in this construction. Based on
his classification of wh-elements in swiping sentences given in (22), Merchant(2002) proposes the generalization in (24) that the wh-element must be a head,
not a phrase.６(22) Possible and impossible wh-elements in swiping:a.

Swiping possible:

who, what, when, whereb.

Swiping impossible:

which, which one, whose, how rich,what kind, what time, what town, etc.

(23) a. * She bought a robe for one of her nephews, but God knows which(one) for.
b. * They were riding in somebody’s car, but I don’ know whose in.
(24) The Minimality Condition:
Only ‘minimal’ (i.e. X0) wh-operators occur in swiping.

In order to account for this fundamental property of swiping, Merchant(2002) proposed an analysis in which swiping sentences are derived throughwh-movement involving pied-piping of a preposition, followed by head

movement of the wh-word to the selecting preposition in the PF component. A
sample derivation under this analysis is shown in (25).

(25) (John was talking, but I don’t remember …)
a.

wh-movement + P-pied-piping:
[CP

b.

[IP

] ]

he was talking

]

t

]

head movement in PF:[CP [PP what + about t

This[PP about what]sluicing (IP-deletion) in PF:[CP [PP about what] [IPc.

he was talking“P-pied-piping

+

]]

PF

head-movement”

analysisprovidesastraightforward account for the Minimality Condition: In order to adjoin to the
preposition, which is a head, the wh-element must also be a head, due to
Structure Preservation. In other words, by using head movement to derive theobserved inversion, this analysis correctly rules out the possibility that phrasal
wh-operators participate in swiping.
Even though the analysis by Merchant (2002) captures the Minimality
Condition (24) in a straightforward way, it offers no account of thecross-linguistic distribution of swiping that Merchant himself notes: The
languages that allow swiping are limited to those that permit P-stranding.
English, Danish, and some varieties of Norwegian allow swiping, and theselanguages also permit P-stranding, as illustrated in (26) and (27).

(26) Danish:a.

Per ergået ibiografen,

Per isgone to cinema

hven

med.

who

with

men

jeg ved

ikke

but

I

not

know

‘Per went to the movies but I don’t know who with.’
b.

Hvem

har Petersnakket med?

who

has Peter

talkedwith‘Who was Peter talking with?’(27) Norwegian:a.% Per gikk

på

kino,

men jeg veit

ikke hvem

med.

Per wenttocinema

but I

not

with

know

who

‘Per went to the movies but I don’t know who with.’
b.

Hvem

har Persnakket med?

who

has Pertalkedwith‘Who was Per talking with?’

An alternative approach proposed by Hasegawa (2006), Kim (1997), andNakao and Yoshida (2006) is better suited to explain this cross-linguistic
generalization. These studies argue that the swiping construction is derived
through the combination of P-stranding and a rightward movement of PP. A
sample derivation under Kim’s (1997) analysis is shown in (28).

(28) (John was talking, but I don’t remember …)
a.

rightward movement of PP:
[CP

b.

[IP

[PP about what]]]] [PP about what]]

wh-movement + P-stranding:[CPc.

he was talking[IP

he was talking

sluicing (IP-deletion) in PF:
[CP

what

[IP

he was talking] [PP about

t

]

]

Such a “P-stranding + PP movement” analysis is quite appealing in that it
opens up a way to capture the cross-linguistic generalization that swiping is
restricted to P-stranding languages. On the other hand, this approach hasdifficulty in offering a satisfactory account of the Minimality Condition: Thereis no reason not to expect both phrasal and minimal wh-expressions to appear in
the swiping construction, given that both of them can undergo P-stranding.

(29) a.
b.

What was John talking about?
Which (book) was John talking about?

Then, since both the “P-pied-piping + PF head-movement” analysis and the“P-stranding + PP movement” analysis have their own strengths and weaknesses,
the evaluation of these two approaches awaits evidence from a different source.
In light of this situation, we now turn to a novel source of evidence: the timecourse of child language acquisition.

3.2. Transcript Analysis
The “P-pied-piping + PF head-movement” approach and the “P-stranding +PP movement” make different predictions for the acquisition of English. The
former approach gives wh-movement involving P-pied-piping a central role inthe derivation of swiping. Under this analysis, the syntactic knowledge requiredfor P-pied-piping constitutes a proper subset of the syntactic knowledge required
for swiping. Then, we expect that English-learning children should neveracquire swiping significantly earlier than pied-piping with wh-movement. In
other words, the P-pied-piping approach predicts that (30) should hold in theacquisition of English. In contrast, under the P-stranding approach,wh-movement involving P-stranding constitutes a crucial step in deriving
swiping sentences, and the syntactic knowledge required for P-stranding
constitutes a proper subset of the syntactic knowledge required for swiping.
Then, we predict that English-learning children should never acquire swiping
significantly earlier than P-stranding with wh-movement, as stated in (31).

(30) Prediction from the P-pied-piping Approach:English-learning children should acquire P-pied-piping with wh-movement
significantly earlier than or at around the same time as swiping.
(31) Prediction from the P-stranding Approach:English-learning children should acquire P-stranding with wh-movement
significantly earlier than or at around the same time as swiping.

In order to determine which of the two acquisitional predictions is correct,
Sugisaki (2008) analyzed 20 longitudinal corpora for English from theCHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000), which provided a total sample ofmore than 434,000 lines of child speech. For each child, we located the firstclear uses of (i) swiping, (ii) wh-movement involving P-pied-piping, and (iii)
wh-movement involving P-stranding. The corpora analyzed in this study arelisted in (32). The CLAN program Combo was used, together with complete
files of prepositions and wh-words in English, to identify potentially relevant
child utterances. These were then searched by hand and checked against theoriginal transcripts to exclude imitations, repetitions, and formulaic routines.
The age of acquisition was taken as the first clear use, followed soon after by
repeated use (Stromswold 1996, Snyder 2007).
The results were as follows. Two children (Abe and Aran) showed frequent
use of swiping, while other children did not produce any swiping sentences. Oneof these two children (Abe), however, uttered only a single type of swiping:
What for? This limitation leaves the possibility that this expression is aformulaic routine for this child. Hence, we should focus on the analysis of theremaining single child, Aran.
Aran exhibited the first clear use of swiping at the age of 2;07. His swiping
sentences exhibited two kinds of wh-expressions (who and what) and various
different prepositions. This variety suggests that Aran had already acquired
adult-like knowledge of swiping. Some actual utterances are listed in (33).

(32) Corpora Analyzed:
Child
Abe
Adam
Anne
Aran
Becky
Carl
Dominic
Eve
Gail
Joel
John
Liz
Naomi
Nicole
Nina
Peter
Ruth
Sarah
Shem
WarrenCollected by
Kuczaj (1976)
Brown (1973)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Brown (1973)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Sachs (1973)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Suppes (1973)
Bloom (1970)
Theakston et al. (2001)
Brown (1973)
Clark (1978)
Theakston et al. (2001)

Age Span
2;04 – 5;00
2;03 – 4;10
1;10 – 2;09
1;11 – 2;10
2;00 – 2;11
1;08 – 2;08
1;10 – 2;10
1;06 – 2;03
1;11 – 2;11
1;11 – 2;10
1;11 – 2;10
1;11 – 2;10
1;02 – 4;09
2;00 – 3;00
1;11 – 3;03
1;09 – 3;01
1;11 – 2;11
2;03 – 5;01
2;02 – 3;02
1;10 – 2;09(33) a.

*CHI:

what in ?

(Aran26a.cha)

b.

*CHI:

who for ?

(Aran27a.cha)

c.

*CHI:

who from ?

(Aran28b.cha)

d.

*CHI:

what with ?

(Aran33a.cha)# Child Utterances
22,63345,555
19,902
17,19323,33925,084
21,18011,563
16,973
17,916
13,39016,56915,96016,95031,50526,891
20,41937,012
17,507
16,651

Despite such productive use of swiping, Aran showed not a single use of
P-pied-piping with wh-movement. This complete absence of P-pied-piping inthe spontaneous speech makes it difficult to statistically evaluate the prediction
from the P-pied-piping approach in (30). Yet, the lack of P-pied-piping in childEnglish despite the presence of swiping casts serious doubt on any analysis inwhich swiping is derived through wh-movement involving P-pied-piping.
In contrast, P-stranding under wh-movement was frequently observed in
Aran’s speech. The first clear use of P-stranding appeared at the age of 2;05, twomonths earlier than the first clear use of swiping. We evaluated the statisticalsignificance of the observed age-differences between acquisition of P-stranding
and acquisition of swiping by using the same method as the one described in
section 2. This statistical analysis revealed that Aran acquired P-stranding
significantly earlier than swiping (p < .0001, by Binomial Test), along the linesof the prediction in (31). This finding, combined with the complete lack of
P-pied-piping, lends support to the P-stranding approach to swiping, and puts
further explanatory burden on the P-pied-piping analysis.

4.

Conclusion
In this study, I summarized some of my own works on the acquisition of

preposition stranding and of pied-piping to illustrate how the investigations ofchild language can contribute to the study of syntax. I argued that evidence fromchild language sharply restricts the range of possible analyses concerning (i) the
parameter of P-stranding, and (ii) the derivation of swiping construction. I
sincerely hope that this study successfully demonstrated that the time course ofchild language acquisition is potentially an important ground to differentiate
among competing syntactic analyses, and hence is able to make significant
contributions to the theoretical studies of syntax.

Notes*

I would like to thank Seiki Ayano, Yukio Otsu, Kensuke Takita, Akira

Watanabe, and especially Cedic Boeckx for valuable comments. I am also
grateful to the audience at TCP 2008 for comments and discussion. The usual
disclaimers apply. This research was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for
Scientific Research (B) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science(#17320062, Project Leader: Seiki Ayano).
1.

See Sugisaki (2003) and Sugisaki and Snyder (2005/2006) for an

acquisitional evaluation of Kayne’s (1981, 1984) parametric proposal.
2.

This section is based on Sugisaki and Snyder (2002).

3.

This section is based on Isobe and Sugisaki (2002).

4.

See Isobe (2005) for evidence from an elicited-production experiment.

5.

This section is based on Sugisaki (2008).

6.

The wh-expressions which and whose are monomorphemic, as well as thosein (22a). Yet, Merchant (2002) argues that which must select a complement(which may be null due to NP-ellipsis), and whose can be analyzed as who in thespecifier of DP headed by the genitive ’s. These properties distinguish themfrom the other simple wh-expressions listed in (22a).

References
Abels, Klaus. 2003. Successive cyclicity, anti-locality, and adposition stranding.
Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Baltin, Mark, and Paul M. Postal. 1996. More on reanalysis hypothesis.
Linguistic Inquiry 27:127-145.
Bloom, Lois. 1970. Language development: Form and function in emerging
grammars. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Bloom, Lois. 1973. One word at a time: The use of single word utterances
before syntax. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bošković, Željko. 2004. Be careful where you float your quantifiers. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 22:681-742.
Brown, Roger. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press.
Clark, Eve. 1978. Strategies for communicating. Child Development
49:953-959.
van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen. 2004. Ellipsis in Dutch dialects. LOT dissertation
series 96, Utrecht: LOT.
Crain, Stephen, and Rosalind Thornton. 1998. Investigations in Universal
Grammar: A guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax andsemantics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Hasegawa, Hiroshi. 2006. On swiping. English Linguistics 23:433-445.
Herslund, Michael. 1984. Particles, prefixes and preposition stranding. In Topics
in Danish syntax, 34-71. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.

Higginson, Roy. 1985. Fixing: A demonstration of the child's active role inlanguage acquisition. Doctoral dissertation, Washington State University,
Washington.
Hornstein, Norbert, and Amy Weinberg. 1981. Case theory and preposition
stranding. Linguistic Inquiry 12:55-91.
Hyams, Nina. 1986. Language acquisition and the theory of parameters.
Dordrecht: Reidel.
Isobe, Miwa. 2005. Pied-piping in child French: An experimental study. In
Proceedings of the 29th Annual Boston University Conference on
Language Development, eds. Alejna Brugos, Manuella R. Clark-Cottonand Seungwan Ha, 294-305. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Isobe, Miwa, and Koji Sugisaki. 2002. The Acquisition of pied-piping in Frenchand its theoretical implications. Paper presented at Going Romance 2002,
Workshop on Acquisition, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Kayne, Richard. 1981. On certain differences between French and English.
Linguistic Inquiry 12:349-371.
Kayne, Richard. 1984. Connectedness and binary branching. Dordrecht: Foris.
Kim, Jeong-Seok. 1997. Syntactic focus movement and ellipsis: A minimalist
approach. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Koopman, Hilda. 1984. The syntax of verbs: From verb movement rules in the
Kru languages to Universal Grammar. Dordrecht: Foris.
Kuczaj, Stan. 1976. -ing, -s, and -ed: A study of the acquisition of certain verb
inflections. Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota.
Law, Paul. 1998. A unified analysis of P-stranding in Romance and Germanic.
In Proceedings of NELS 28, eds. Pius N. Tamanji and Kiyomi Kusumoto,219-234. University of Massachusetts, Amherst: GLSA.
Law, Paul. 2006. Preposition stranding. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax,
eds. Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, 631-684. Oxford:
Blackwell.
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk.
Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Maling, Joan. 1977. A typology of preposition-stranding in Germanic.
Unpublished paper presented at GLOW conference, Amsterdam.
McDaniel, Dana, Bonnie Chiu, and Thomas L. Maxfield. 1995. Parameters for
wh-movement types: Evidence from child English. Natural Language andLinguistic Theory 13:709-753.
Merchant, Jason. 2002. Swiping in Germanic. In Studies in Comparative
Germanic Syntax, eds. C. Jan-Wouter Zwart and Werner Abraham,295-321. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nakao, Chizuru, and Masaya Yoshida. 2006. "Not-so-propositional" islands andtheir implications for swiping. In Proceedings of Western Conference on
Linguistics (WECOL) 2006, eds. Erin Bainbridge and Brian Agbayani,322-333. California State University, Fresno, CA.
Otsu, Yukio. 1981. Universal Grammar and syntactic development in children:
Toward a theory of syntactic development. Doctoral dissertation, MIT,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Richards, Norvin. 2001. Movement in language: Interactions and architectures.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Riemsdijk, Henk. 1978. A case study in syntactic markedness: The binding
nature of prepositional phrases. Dordrecht: Foris.

Rosen, Carol. 1976. Guess what about? Proceedings of the 6th Annual Meetingof the North Eastern Linguistic Society, 205-211.
Ross, John Robert. 1969. Guess who? Papers from the 5th Regional Meeting of
the Chicago Linguistic Society, 252-286.
Sachs, Jacqueline. 1973. Talking about here and then: The emergence of
displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In Children's Language,
Volume 4, ed. K. E. Nelson. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Salles, Heloisa Maria Moreira-Lima. 1997. Prepositions and the syntax ofcomplementation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Wales, Bangor.
Snyder, William. 2007. Child language: The parametric approach. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Stowell, Timothy. 1981. Origins of phrase structure. Doctoral dissertation, MIT,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Stowell, Timothy. 1982. Conditions on reanalysis. In MIT Working Papers in
Linguistics 4, eds. Alec Marantz and Tim Stowell, 245-269. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
Stromswold, Karin. 1996. Analyzing children's spontaneous speech. In Methods
for assessing children's syntax, eds. Dana McDaniel, Cecile McKee andHelen Smith Cairns, 23-53. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Sugisaki, Koji. 2003. Innate constraints on language variation: Evidence fromchild language. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Sugisaki, Koji. 2008. Swiping in child English. Paper presented at the 27th West
Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL XXVII), Poster
session.
Sugisaki, Koji, and William Snyder. 2002. Preposition stranding and thecompounding parameter: A developmental perspective. In Proceedings ofthe 26th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development,
eds. Barbora Skarabela, Sarah Fish and Anna H.-J. Do, 677-688.
Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press.
Sugisaki, Koji, and William Snyder. 2005/2006. The parameter of preposition
stranding: A view from child English. Language Acquisition 13:349-361.
Suppes, Patrick. 1973. The semantics of children's language. American
Psychologist 88:103-114.
Suppes, Patrick, R. Smith, and M. Léveillé. 1974. The French syntax of a child's
noun phrase. Archives de Psychologie 42, 207-269.
Theakston, Anna. L., Elena V. M. Lieven, Julian M. Pine, & Caroline F.
Rowland. 2001. The role of performance limitations in the acquisitionof verb-argument structure: an alternative account. Journal of Child
Language 28: 127-152.
Thornton, Rosalind. 2004. Why continuity. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual
Boston University Conference on Language Development, eds. Alejna
Brugos, Linnea Micciulla and Christine E. Smith, 620-632. Somerville,
Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press.

(sugisaki@human.mie-u.ac.jp)