Chapter 9 - LOT publications

Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans
between overt and covert movement, which raises questions about its
merit. 147
A further criticism against the ATOM concerns the claim that one would
not find utterances such as Her walks in the language of children with
SLI, where subject-verb agreement and tense are indicated overtly, and
the subject pronoun has accusative case. If the subject is taken to
originate in the specifier position of the VP (or νP) and there is no TP
present in the derivation, then the subject cannot move to the TP. If the
subject does not move, one would expect DPs with any case to occur in
the subject position of the sentence, because nominal expressions (for
example, pronouns in English) are assumed to be retrieved from the
lexicon with their case. Because there is no TP to check whether the case
of the DP occurring in the subject position is, in fact, the correct case,
such DPs can occur in what Wexler calls the “default” case, which is
taken to be accusative for English. Because the case feature of the DP
can receive a phonetic interpretation, 148 it follows that the occurrence of
a DP with the incorrect, accusative case will not cause the derivation to
crash at PF. In fact, examples such as Her walks do occur relatively
frequently in the language of children with SLI (cf. Pine, Rowland,
Lieven, and Theakston 2002).
Despite the above criticisms, 149 and although not explicitly stated as such
by Rice, Wexler, and colleagues, the ATOM – interpreted within a
147 Also see the comments in section 3.4.3 on the overt-covert distinction possibly
becoming a defunct one (cf. Hornstein et al. 2005:312).
148 It could, of course, also be that the subject does carry the correct abstract case
(NOM), but that this case is given the incorrect sound form, i.e., that an error occurs
with the mapping of the morphological information onto the phonological form.
149 I also take note of (i) the criticism by Rispoli (1999, 2002, 2005) against the ATOM;
(ii) Charest and Leonard’s (2004) indication that the proposals of the ATOM need to
be altered in order to account for their empirical findings; (iii) Joseph, Pine, and Conti-
Ramsden’s (2002) and Pine, Rowland, Lieven, and Theakston’s (2002) finding that there
are relatively frequent exceptions to the predictions of the ATOM; and (iv) Pine et al.’s
(2002:273) comment that the range of situations in which the predictions of the ATOM
can be tested is limited. Pine et al. (2004: 913) word the latter criticism more strongly:
“… the ATOM derives much of its power from the fact that it is actually extremely
difficult to test”. A related criticism is that the “invisibility” of agreement (and
subsequent assignment of nominative in the case of [-tense, +agr]) is unfalsifiable,
which could lead to the whole proposal being seen as somewhat stipulative. I
furthermore take note of Lin’s (2006) suggestion that an alternative account – one on
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