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- ISSN: 2382-6282 (Print); 2972-3108 (Online)
- Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Lang. Lit. Linguist.
- Frequency: Bimonthly
- DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL
- Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Jason Miin-Hwa Lim
- Managing Editor: Jennifer X. Zeng
- Indexed by: CNKI, Google Scholar, Crossref,
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IJLLL 2023 Vol.9(2): 141-151
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2023.9.2.395
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2023.9.2.395
Optimality Theory and the Development of Do-Support in Children’s Wh-Questions
Nobuyo Fukaya
Abstract—This study aims to explore where-, how-, and why-questions produced by young L1 English-speaking children and to account for how children develop wh-questions within Optimality Theory (OT). For this purpose, the data have been collected from the Child Language Data Exchange System database. The analysis showed that where-questions were produced earlier than how- and why-questions and that early where-questions tended to fail subject-auxiliary inversion in the early stages. Another finding is that children produced howquestions with subject-auxiliary inversion even when howquestions started to be attested. To account for the developmental differences observed in the data, I propose an OT analysis. This study shows the applicability of OT to syntactic language development and demonstrates that OT provides a unified account of the development of wh-questions by reranking the same constraint set. Moreover, a developmental difference shown in wh-phrases can also be accounted for by assuming that the constraint, Operator in Specifier (OP-SPEC), can be divided into sub-constraints.
Index Terms—where-questions, how-questions, why-questions, optimality theory, CHILDES
Fukaya Nobuyo is with Niigata Agro-Food University, Japan.
E-mail: nobuyo-fukaya@ nafu.ac.jp (F.N.)
Index Terms—where-questions, how-questions, why-questions, optimality theory, CHILDES
Fukaya Nobuyo is with Niigata Agro-Food University, Japan.
E-mail: nobuyo-fukaya@ nafu.ac.jp (F.N.)
Cite:Nobuyo Fukaya, "Optimality Theory and the Development of Do-Support in Children’s Wh-Questions," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 145-151, 2023.