Kamil Ud Deen
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Children in a wide range of languages show evidence of Principle C at the earliest testable ages (Crain & McKee, 1985; Kazanina & Phillips, 2001; Lukyanenko et.al., 2008; amongst many others). This has been taken as evidence that Principle C is a universal, innate principle of grammar (Crain, 1991). However, Thai is a language in which Principle C appears to be violable, at least in certain contexts. This could be taken as initial evidence that Principle C is in fact not part of Universal Grammar, but is learned from experience (or in the case of Thai, not learned because the experience does not contain Principle C). Moreover, if Principle C is learned from the input, then we predict that Thai children will never show evidence of Principle C, and will thus pattern like Thai adults from the earliest testable ages. But if Principle C is part of UG, Thai children should initially show evidence of Principle C in contexts that adults do not, only to ‘unlearn’ this over time. In this talk, I first describe the contexts in which Principle C applies in adult Thai. I then show that Thai children overgeneralize Principle C: they disallow a coindexed reading in contexts where adults allow it. This shows that Principle C is innately specified, and fully available to Thai children at early ages.
Thai adults apply Principle C in contexts where the relevant R-expressions are full DPs (modified by a classifier or a demonstrative), but not when the relevant R-expressions are unmodified by classifiers/demonstratives (Larson, 2005), as in (1).
(1)