Chapter 9 - LOT publications

Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans
language of children with SLI. 165 The reason why the RDDR’s
explanation is not adequate is because the verb’s phonological form is
not dependent on the application of Move.
Moreover, it is not the case that children with SLI only (optionally) omit
grammatical morphemes; they also sometimes insert such morphemes
into inappropriate contexts, as shown in the *You got a tape recorders
(Gopnik 1990a:147) example given in chapter 2. The RDDR, in its
current form, offers no explanation for the latter phenomenon.
9.3.2. Predictions of the RDDR for Afrikaans
According to Van der Lely (2003:127), the operation Move is optional in
the grammar of children with SLI. Accordingly, a first consequence of
the RDDR would be that the utterances of Afrikaans-speaking children
with SLI should demonstrate varying word order. Specifically, in simple
declaratives, the surface SOV order should occur frequently, as this is the
order that will result if no movement takes place. Similarly, wh-questions
in which the wh-phrase did not move from its original underlying
position should also occur, rendering forms such as *Jy wat doen? ‘You
what do?’ instead of Wat doen jy?. However, other surface word orders
should, at least in principle, occur equally frequently. For example,
sentences with the surface SVO main clause order, such as Ek eet druiwe
‘I eat grapes’, should occur, with the verb eet moved to the left, but the
object druiwe remaining in its initial underlying position.
Secondly, in terms of the RDDR, Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI
should have difficulties understanding and producing passive
constructions – although, as pointed out above, Van der Lely’s reasons
for why children with SLI experience problems with these constructions
are not entirely clear. A third consequence of the RDDR would be that
Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI should experience problems in
interpreting and producing constructions in which co-referential
relationships occur.
165 I acknowledge that this criticism of RDDR is highly “theory-internal”, i.e., strictly
related to the perspective of Chomsky’s (1995a) Minimalist Programme. Some of Van
der Lely’s proposals might be compatible with a Distributive Morphology approach,
where functional heads are spelled out late in the derivation, i.e., after syntactic
computation.
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