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The Full Competence Hypothesis of Clause Structure in Early German

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

David Poeppel and
Kenneth Wexler
David Poeppel*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kenneth Wexler*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139
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Abstract

We argue that young German children have the major functional sentential heads, in particular the inflectional and complementizer systems. The major empirical basis is natural production data from a 25-month-old child. We perform quantitative analyses which show that the full complement of functional categories is available to the child, and that what crucially distinguishes the child's grammar from the adult's is the use of infinitives in matrix clauses. The evidence we consider includes the child's knowledge of finiteness and verb placement, agreement, head movement, and permissible word-order variations. We examine several accounts which presuppose a degenerate grammar or which deviate from the standard analysis of German and conclude that they provide a less adequate explanation of the acquisition facts.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 1993, pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by Linguistic Society of America

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