Truncation in Wh-Questions in Child English

Truncation in Wh-Questions in Child English

Early child English data show that young children produce the wh-questions that seem formulaic and lack CP (Brown, 1968; Radford, 1990; Vainikka, 1993/94; O'Grady, 1997). Besides, one of the notable syntactic characteristics in the acquisition of wh-questions is the order of the development between wh-subject questions and wh-object ones: Wh-subject questions develop earlier than wh-object ones. This order has been explained in several respects, e.g., the animacy effect in Tyack and Ingram (1977), and the syntactic distance hypothesis in O'Grady (1997). This study presents a new account of the observed developmental pattern of wh-constructions in child English, in terms of Truncation Hypothesis which has been pursued in Rizzi's (1994, 2000) serial works. The key point in this study is that children cut off the CP layer which is arguably available from the onset, since children obey a sort of economy principle. In addition, I will explore an potential explanation of the controversial analyses of the structure of the wh-subject question.