Chapter 9 - LOT publications

Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans
(214) Target:
dat hy kan sy fietsie ry
dat hy sy fietsie kan ry
that he can his bicycle-DIM ride that he his bicycle-DIM can ride
‘That he can ride his bicycle’
(215) CP
Spec
C'
C
dat
Spec
hy
T
kan
TP
T'
Spec
hy
DP
sy fietsie
νP
VP
ν'
V
ry
ν
kan ry
It appears then that one can account for most of the word order errors
in terms of Minimalist syntax: Movement operations (mostly) occur as
they should, rendering a fully grammatical (i.e., adult-like) derivation
before the point of Spell-Out. However, at Spell-Out, some copies
which were supposed to receive sound form do not, and others which
were supposed to be left phonologically empty are, in fact, spelled out.
This leads to the proposal that Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI do
not experience problems in the computational component, but in
mapping grammatical features onto sound form.
It could, of course, be argued that the Afrikaans-speaking children with
SLI indeed demonstrate problems with movement operations. In other
words, it could be the case that there is not merely a problem spelling
out a moved element, but that such element, in fact, does not undergo all
the necessary movement operations. However, the former proposal –
that the child copies the element and then fails to spell it out at PF – is
more attractive, amongst other reasons because of the occurrence of the
utterance in (118), repeated here as (216).
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