Arguments for LD movement in LD questions in child language
Résumé
This chapter examines the diagnostics put forth for long movement in long distance questions in child language. It discusses diagnostics from comprehension studies and elicited production studies. The experimental data provide compelling arguments for full successive‐cyclic movement in child language, but has an unexpected result: evidence for partial movement as a transitional stage in language development, raising two issues. (i) Given that there are alternative analyses of partial movement in adult grammars—direct dependency vs. indirect dependency—what are the arguments that long distance questions in child grammar involve long distance movement? (ii) That children go through a stage involving a parameter setting not part of the target grammar, but reflecting a parametric setting for other languages, is expected under the Continuity Hypothesis. The question remains, however, why English children go through a partial movement stage, but a not a wh‐in situ stage, neither of which options is allowed in the target grammar.