Chapter 9 - LOT publications

Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans
(1966). As both ‘be’ and the abstract preposition are semantically
poor, it could be that the child does not provide the complex form
[P+‘be’] with phonological contents at Spell-Out.
Where ge- is omitted, one could argue that the feature bundle
which in the adult grammar matches the sound form of the past
participle is indeed selected from the lexicon, but that, at Spell-
Out, this feature bundle receives a sound form matching that of
the infinitive in the adult grammar. In terms of Distributed
Morphology, a non-adult-like vocabulary item would have “won”
the competition between the verbal forms (finite form, infinitival
form, participial form). This explanation is plausible, seeing that
there are indeed competing past participial forms: those which
resemble infinitival ones (such as onthou ‘remember’ – het onthou
‘remembered’) and those with ge- (such as bou ‘build’ – het gebou
‘built’). The Afrikaans-speaking child with SLI has to identify one
past participial form from a set of competing potential candidates,
and the correct form is then not necessarily identified.
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However, even if one assumes that the incorrect verb form (i.e.,
the infinitive instead of the past participle) was selected from the
lexicon, this incorrect selection should not cause the derivation to
crash, as neither the infinitive nor the past participle has features
which check any feature of the T; the T’s features are checked by
the temporal auxiliary het. However, a past participial form
presumably has a feature which causes it to be selected as the
complement of het. If an infinitive is selected instead of a past
participle, then a selectional feature of het is not checked. Given
that, despite this (apparently) unchecked feature, the derivation
does not crash, one could assume that the feature is, in fact,
checked: A feature bundle resembling that of a past participle was
selected from the lexicon by the child with SLI; at Spell-Out, this
feature bundle is realised in a way which differs morphologically
from the way in which the adult speaker of Afrikaans would
realise it. Again, one could argue that the problem in the grammar
of the Afrikaans-speaking child with SLI lies not in the syntactic
representation, but at Spell-Out; i.e., at the point where the
syntactic representation is mapped onto a phonological
representation.