LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Finite Verb, Nonfinite Verb, Null-Subject Language
Document Summary
The claim that children initially totally lack functional structure doesn"t work: Co-occurrence of inflected and uninflected forms produced by the same child. Same thing as the oi (treated as though they were the same but they have some differences) Both these accounts propose that in early stages children assume that inflection is in some sense optional, going through a period during which the child"s main (or root) clauses may contain an infinitive instead of a finite main verb. In contexts where a finite verb is required in the adult grammar, children vary between producing infinitives and inflected forms. For this reason, this stage is referred to as the optional infinitive stage. In the case of english, we can"t tell whether the uninflected verb forms are infinitives (nonfinite) or whether inflection has been dropped (because we have so little inflection), leaving a bare verb.
