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Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans opt for omitting the sound form of all copies, resulting in none of the copies being spelled out phonologically. The second problem pertaining to the omission of modal auxiliaries is that the meaning of the sentence might no longer be clear if a modal is omitted. Unlike the omission of the temporal auxiliary het – which does not lead to an interpretation problem, due to the fact that the “past” interpretation is arguably recoverable from the past participle verb; cf. *Hy geslaap vs Hy het geslaap – the omission of a modal auxiliary could make the intended meaning of the sentence unclear. For example, by omitting a modal auxiliary like sal ‘will’, moet ‘must’, mag ‘may’, or kan ‘can’, it is not clear exactly what the child intends to ask with *Ons met die ding werk?. (v, vi) The fact that the Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI are ageappropriate in terms of their production of the past tense forms of be, but frequently omit the present tense form of be, could be explained as follows: A structure expressing a proposition minimally consists of a subject argument and a predicate, and the smallest construction by which such a proposition can be expressed is a so-called small clause. A small clause does not allow for more than one argument: It consists of a subject to which a specific attribute is given (e.g., John handsome in I find John handsome). Where the be is omitted, a construction similar to a small clause is rendered – the be is implied and its omission does not alter the intended meaning of the sentence. However, if one wants to convey the idea that a subject previously had a specific attribute but no longer has it, the verb can no longer be implied. For instance, one can omit the be in *Ek hier ‘I here’ and still convey the intended meaning, namely “I am here”. However, if one wants to convey that one had been somewhere (as in Ek was hier (gewees) ‘I had been here’), a phonologically realised verb is required. On this proposal then, is ‘be-PRESENT’ can be left phonologically empty without compromising meaning, but was (gewees) ‘be-PAST’ must be expressed phonologically in order to convey the intended meaning. 284
Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans In conclusion, it appears that, in the grammar of Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI, the abstract feature representation and the movement operations are intact. In other words, the language problems that these children experience do not seem to reside in the computational system underlying the construction of a syntactic representation. That is, SLIchildren are able to build a convergent LF-representation. Their problem seems to lie at Spell-Out, where the feature bundles need to receive sound form: Either a deviant (i.e., non-adult-like) sound form is given, or the features are not spelled out phonologically at all. 9.6.4. Another look at the word order errors Recall that all three groups of participants made word order errors, but not all types of errors were made by all groups, and that the only error type which appeared unique to the SLI group was that of SOV and VSO in non-embedded clauses. In this section, we will revisit some of the examples given in section 8.3.3. Specifically, it will be argued that these problems with word order relate to the Spell-Out of chains, i.e., to the “decision” as to which copy will be realised in the PF-representation. At times, the head of a chain is spelled out (this is not discussed here, seeing that this renders the correct, adult-like word order); at times, an intermediate copy is spelled out (e.g., the copy of a verb in T is spelled out in T instead of the copy in C); and at yet other times, the syntactic constituent is spelled out in situ (i.e., the “lowest” copy receives sound form). Though not given in section 8.3.3, there were also examples in the Afrikaans data of more than one copy receiving sound form, and these examples will also be discussed here. Let us begin by considering the derivation of examples (142), (143), and (154) – repeated here as (197), (199), and (201), respectively – presented in (198), (200) and (202). From (198), it appears that the child with SLI does not experience problems with the movement operations required for feature checking. Rather, it appears that the problem lies at Spell- Out, where an incorrect copy receives sound form. More specifically, in (198), the copy of kyk surfaces phonologically in the head position of small v. It is assumed that the verb is finite (and as such specified for the grammatical features tense and agreement). As such, the verb also undergoes movement to C (via T), rendering a verb-second pattern. In other words, the computational rules of this Afrikaans-speaking child 285
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