Florian Jaeger wrote:
> ... As Bob said, corpora do not provide explicit negative
> evidence (although, statistically, if we get large enough balanced corpora
> the likelihood that the absence of a structure [rather than a specific
> string instance of that structure] actually means that this structure does
> not exist in the language increases, but arguably even current Gigaword
> corpora are still quite small).
Yes, but how does the _child_ separate the signal from the noise?
By the age of ten, the child may well have heard or read a few parasitic
gap constructions. But they've heard scads of ill-formed things,
ranging from where the speaker is cut off, or starts over, or can't
think of the right word, or is a non-native speaker; not to mention
slips of the tongue, or confused utterances. (Hey, I've been confused.
Or am I?) So how do they know that parasitic gaps are OK, and the
other stuff isn't?
When my poor kids were growing up, I tried several ill-formed
constructions on them, such as "Whose did you find book?". The kids
ignored me. (Of course, they do that a lot...)
On the other hand, I was impressed at the way both our children picked
up the negative aux preposing construction--"Never have I done that",
which I would think would be rather rare. (And they use it correctly,
i.e. always with a negative adverb or NP, not: *"Often have I done
that." Despite the fact that I've probably heard or seen the latter,
and maybe they have, too.)
-- Mike Maxwell Linguistic Data Consortium maxwell@ldc.upenn.edu
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