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Cleft sentences and reconstruction in child language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Rosalind Thornton,
Hirohisa Kiguchi and
Elena D'Onofrio
Rosalind Thornton*
Affiliation:
Macquarie University
Hirohisa Kiguchi*
Affiliation:
Miyagi Gakuin Women's University
Elena D'Onofrio*
Affiliation:
Macquarie University
*
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders and Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, 16 University Drive, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia, [Rosalind.Thornton@mq.edu.au, [elena.d@live.ca]
College of Liberal Arts, Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, 9-1-1 Sakuragaoka, Aoba Sendai 981-8557, Japan, [Kiguchi1972@yahoo.co.jp]
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders and Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, 16 University Drive, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia, [Rosalind.Thornton@mq.edu.au, [elena.d@live.ca]
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Abstract

This study examines it-clefts in four- and five-year-old English-speaking children using a truth-value judgment task. The goal was to find out whether children (i) observe principle C in clefts like It was Spot that he brushed and (ii) access bound-variable interpretations in clefts like It was her pig that every girl carried, despite the lack of c-command between relevant elements in the surface representation. Our experimental finding was that children behave like adults. This suggests that children do not rely solely on the word order of sentences encountered in their linguistic input, but use mechanisms made available by innate linguistic knowledge for interpretation.

Keywords

universal grammarit-cleftsreconstructionacquisition of syntaxprinciple Cbound variables

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 94 , Issue 2 , June 2018, pp. 405 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CE1101021; www.ccd.edu.au) and by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi), Scientific Research Category C (#23520519, #17K02738). We would like to thank Stephen Crain, Shoichi Takahashi, and two referees for their helpful comments.

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