• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Search for abstracts --- authors title abstract

---

Abstract ID: 1284

Part of Session 148: Child Language Variation (Other abstracts in this session)

Acquiring inherent variability: child language acquisition of Belfast English

Authors: Henry, Alison
Submitted by: Henry, Alison (University of Ulster, United Kingdom)

Acquiring inherent variability: child language acquisition of Belfast English

Work in syntactic theory has tended to consider grammars as intrinsically invariant. From Chomsky’s original proposal that we should investigate the grammar of an ideal speaker-hearer in a homogeneous speech community, to the anti-optionality view inherent in notions of economy within Minimalist syntax, it has been a central facet of work in syntactic theory that variability either does not really exist or is inherently unstable (see for example Tortora 2011 on Appalachian English).

This paper discusses children’s acquisition of a number of structures that exhibit variability in the adult input, including negative concord, inversion in imperatives and . The focus is on singular concord (Henry 1995), where a plural non-pronominal  DP subject can appear with a singular or plural verb form:

                1. The toys is broken

                2. The toys are broken

The study shows firstly that in adult input there is variability in these structures,  and that the presence of a child does not lead the adult to use less variation than in talking to adults. It is shown that, faced with such variable input, children acquire both variants.  This is even the case with variants that appear rather infrequently in the adult input. For example, singular concord occurs on less than 10% of possible occasions in adult input, but is nevertheless acquired by children, calling into question Lightfoot’s (1991) suggestion in relation to parameter (re-)setting that something that occurs less than 30% of the time in the input will not be acquired. This should not in fact be surprising, because children acquiring a grammar not generating a structure that occurs in 30% or even 10% of the input of that structure, are left in a position where a substantial amount of the input cannot be parsed by their grammars.

The paper concludes that acquisition does not favour invariant grammars, but rather allows the learning of variable grammars which we know from sociolinguists to be characteristic of adult linguistic competence, and to be able to persist from generation to generation without one variant necessarily ‘winning out’ over the other in some kind of ‘grammar competition’.