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Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans (193) Target: daai klein kleintjie het hy heel melk daai klein kleintjie het hy al sy melk opdrink? opgedrink? that little little-one did he whole milk that little little-one did he all his milk up-drink-INF up-drink-PAST PART ‘That little one, did he finish all his milk?’ The omission of the temporal auxiliary het occurred only in the language of the children with SLI: six times in the first 100 utterances and 11 times in the remainder of the 30 minutes. Examples of such errors are given in (194) and (195). (194) Target: hy jy bed gesteel hy het jou bed gesteel he you-SGL-NOM bed steal-PAST PART he did your-SGL bed steal-PAST PART ‘He stole your bed’ (195) Target: jy moet nie geloop nie jy moet/moes nie geloop het nie you-SGL must not walk-PAST PART not you-SGL must/must-PAST not walk -PAST PART did not ‘You were not supposed to walk’ / ‘You should not have walked’ Finally, on Gopnik’s Feature Deficit Hypothesis, it is not clear whether Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI should experience difficulties in terms of the production and interpretation of passive constructions, (non-)co-referential relationships, and question constructions when compared to their typically developing peers. As stated in section 9.3.3, passive constructions and those containing co-referential relationships had a very low rate of occurrence in the language samples of all three groups of children, making it difficult to draw any conclusion regarding these constructions. In terms of question constructions, the children with SLI made errors not found in the language of the typically developing 6-year-olds. However, these errors mostly related to the omission of words or constituents, and definitely not to grammatical morphemes. 272
Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans 9.5. SUMMARY: PREDICTIONS OF THE THREE ACCOUNTS FOR SLI IN AFRIKAANS Research question 5 asked whether or not the predictions made for the language of Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI by some current theoretical accounts of SLI are borne out by the Afrikaans data obtained in this study. Support was found neither for the three predictions of the ATOM nor for the four of the RDDR. Of the five made by the Feature Deficit Hypothesis, one was partly borne out. Apart from the fact that the accounts of SLI examined here do not make useful predictions for the language of Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI, the children with SLI in the present study made errors in their spontaneous language production which fall outside the scope of these accounts. Therefore, it appears that there is a need for an alternative account of SLI as it presents itself in Afrikaans. In the next section, an attempt is made to address this need. 9.6. AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT OF SLI AS IT PRESENTS ITSELF IN AFRIKAANS 9.6.1. Background A general assumption was that Minimalist syntax has the potential to offer interesting explanations for the problems that children with SLI experience with grammatical morphology and constituent movement. In chapter 3, it was said that the assumptions and devices of Minimalist syntax could make it possible to give a unified explanation of apparently unrelated phenomena (i.e., problems with grammatical morphemes, word order, question and passive constructions, and co-reference) in terms of the devices of feature checking and movement – in the sense that movement is driven by the need for feature checking in order to prevent a derivation from crashing. In this section, we investigate whether this is indeed the case: Can an account for the language problems of the Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI be offered in terms of these assumptions and devices of Minimalist syntax? Before examining whether or not this is possible, another look is taken at exactly what needs to be accounted for. In section 9.6.2, the error 273
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