PRONOUN CASE OVEREXTENSIONS AND PARADIGM BUILDING

Pronoun case errors, or overextensions, like me want it are characteri stic of English child language. This paper explores a hypothesis that the morphological structure of a pronoun influences the pattern of the se errors. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) attempts to analyse E nglish pronoun case forms into stems and affixes, but cannot because o f their irregularity. Nevertheless the LAD extracts a phonetic core fo r each pronoun (e.g. /m-/ for the 1st sg., /h-/ for the 3rd masc. sg.) . The phonetic core blocks the overextension of suppletive nominative forms like I and she. This hypothesis predicts strong differences in t he frequency and types of errors between pronouns with suppletive nomi natives and those without. Evidence for this hypothesis was found in a transcript database of twelve children, with data collected in one ho ur samples every month from 1;0 to 3;0. 20,908 pronouns were examined, 1347 of which were errors. Statistical analyses of these data provide support for this hypothesis.