Ingham R
Department of Linguistic Science, University of Reading, Whiteknights, UK.
J Child Lang. 1992 Feb;19(1):133-51. doi: 10.1017/s0305000900013660.
Recent treatments of the optionality of sentence subjects in young-children's English have sought to link this phenomenon, and its eventual demise, to the development of the child's verb inflection system or to a parameter-resetting within the INFL ('inflection') constituent of the child's grammar. It is claimed that subject optionality disappears when these developments occur. The case-study reported here investigated the productive language of an English child between 2;5 and 3;0. It found that subjects were no longer optional at a stage when none of the reflexes of INFL claimed in the literature to be associated with the disappearance of subject optionality had yet been acquired. The possibility that subjects were present only when communicatively required was rejected. The frequency of subject realization of a Japanese child aged 3;0 was used to provide a measure of expected realization when subjects are not grammatically required. It is concluded that subject obligatoriness in English may be acquired as a characteristic of the language sui generis, independently of developments elsewhere in the child's emerging grammar.
近期对幼儿英语中句子主语可选性的研究试图将这一现象及其最终消失与儿童动词屈折系统的发展或儿童语法中INFL（“屈折”）成分内的参数重置联系起来。据称，当这些发展出现时，主语可选性就会消失。本文所报告的案例研究调查了一名2岁5个月至3岁儿童的产出性语言。研究发现，在文献中声称与主语可选性消失相关的INFL的任何特征都尚未习得的阶段，主语不再是可选的。主语仅在交际需要时才出现的可能性被排除。一名3岁日本儿童主语实现的频率被用来衡量在语法上不需要主语时的预期实现情况。研究得出结论，英语中的主语强制性可能作为该语言特有的一个特征而习得，独立于儿童正在形成的语法中其他地方的发展情况。
