doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2023.9.2.395
Optimality Theory and the Development of Do-Support in Children’s Wh-Questions
Nobuyo Fukaya
- Niigata Agro-Food University, Japan.
Abstract
This study aims to explore <em>where-</em>, <em>how-</em>, and <em>why-</em>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 <em>how-</em> and <em>why-</em>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 <em>wh-</em>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.
Keywords
- where-</em>questions
- <em>how-</em>questions
- <em>why-</em>questions
- optimality theory
- CHILDES
How to 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. 141-151, 2023. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2023.9.2.395
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).