Open AccessHead movement and allomorphy in children's negative questions
Author(s) -
Marjorie Pak
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
proceedings of the linguistic society of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2473-8689
DOI - 10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4321
Subject(s) - raising (metalworking) , allomorph , head (geology) , psychology , linguistics , product (mathematics) , movement (music) , philosophy , cognitive psychology , mathematics , biology , aesthetics , paleontology , geometry , morpheme
English-speaking preschoolers occasionally produce negative questions with a ‘doubled’ auxiliary (e.g. Why did you didn’t know?). These 2AuxQs apparently involve a failure to raise [NEG n’t] to C (cf. Why didn’t you know?). I analyze 2AuxQs as the product of two independent errors: a planning error (raising T-to-C without raising Neg-to-T first) and an allomorphy error (overgeneralization of ‑n’t). The planning error results from lack of practice: serial head-movement is relatively uncommon in English, and true Neg-to-T-to-C may be rarer than appearances suggest. In e.g. Why don’t we play, ok?, -n’t is not interpreted within TP—and strikingly, 2AuxQs are unattested here.