Ting Xu (PhD 2016, now at Tsinghua University) and Shuyan Wang (PhD 2022, now a post-doc at UConn) have published an article in the journal Languages, titled “On the Acquisition of English Complex Predicates and Complex Word Formation: Revisiting the Parametric Approach”. Congratulations Ting and Shuyan!

Abstract: Languages vary in their availability of productive endocentric bare-stem compounds (e.g., flower hat) and a range of complex predicates (separable verb-particles, double object datives, adjectival resultatives, put-locatives, make-causatives, and perceptual reports). To account for these cross-linguistic variations, two parameters have been proposed: the Compounding Parameter (TCP), which governs the formation of bare-stem compounds, separable verb-particles, and adjectival resultatives, and the Small Clause Parameter (SCP), which determines whether a verb can take a small clause complement. These parameters make testable predictions about children’s acquisition. If TCP and SCP are on the right track, we would expect correlations in the acquisition of structures governed by each parameter. This study examines these predictions by analyzing longitudinal corpora from 23 English-speaking children, assessing both the correlation between the acquisition of different structures and their acquisitional ordering. Our findings support both TCP and SCP, confirming that the acquisition of bare-stem compounds is closely associated with that of separable verb-particles, while the acquisition of (some) complex predicates is related. In addition, our results offer new insights into the potential triggers that children use to set each parameter. These findings contribute to our understanding of language variation and the role of parameter setting in first language acquisition.

The paper “Argument ellipsis as topic deletion” by our alumnus Teruyuki Mizuno (PhD 2023, now at Ochanomizu University, Tokyo) has just been published online in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory ahead of the print version. Congratulations Teru! The paper can be accessed here.

Abstract: In recent syntactic literature, argument ellipsis has become a productive perspective of investigation for null arguments in natural language. Focusing on Japanese as the primary object of study, this paper aims to deepen our understanding of the underlying syntactic mechanism behind the derivation of argument ellipsis. The main empirical observation is that argument ellipsis and topicalization exhibit a striking parallelism with respect to the way they interact with wh-dependencies. Building on this observation, I argue that argument ellipsis is an instance of topic deletion, which involves movement of arguments to Spec,TopicP, and phonological deletion of the arguments under the identity of the topic in discourse. I show that the topic-deletion account of argument ellipsis offers a principled explanation for a variety of restrictions concerning what types of argument can or cannot undergo ellipsis. I also suggest that the proposed account enables a unified perspective on argument ellipsis and discourse pro-drop by analyzing them uniformly as instances of topic deletion, thereby shedding new light on the deep typological correlation that has been observed between them.