ABSTRACT
Pierce and V. Deprez and Pierce argued that early crosslinguistic acquisition data on the placement of subjects and negation in English, French, and German support a model of the grammar that assumes the VP-internal subject hypothesis and a syntactic approach to inflectional morphology guiding parametric variations in verb movement. These data also provide evidence for the presence of functional projections in early child grammar and raise interesting questions about the manifestation of various types of movement operations. This chapter discusses the obligatory/optional character of movement rules, addresses challenges posed by some recent acquisition results, and explores a possible explanation within present syntactic models. The early crosslinguistic acquisition data also provide evidence for the presence of functional projections in early child grammar and raise interesting questions about the manifestation of various types of movement operations. The chapter reviews the cross-linguistic acquisition data that provide evidence for a cross-linguistic parallel in the acquisition of certain types of movements.
