ABSTRACT
Agency has been noted to play a significant role in children’s early word combinations (see Budwig, 1995, for review). Although there is substantial evidence that from the earliest word combinations, children link the notion of grammatical subject with agent, less is known about the development of nonagent subjects. This chapter reports on an exploratory study that examined the frequency and function of English- and German-speaking children’s talk about nonagent subjects. Specifically, this study focuses on nonagent subjects by examining not only issues of frequency, but also the forms and functions associated with such usage. In addition, it makes crosslinguistic comparisons of children acquiring English and German.
