THE SYNTAX OF QUESTIONS IN CHILD ENGLISH

The purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary Government-an d-Binding (GB) reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima & Bellugi's cl assic 1966 work on the acquisition of interrogatives. I argue that the central insight of K&B's paper can be captured by positing that wh-qu estions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head c omplementizer (C) position within the Complementizer Phrase (CP) (so b locking auxiliary inversion if this involves positioning an inverted a uxiliary in C) and that in the transition tp Adult English, children c ome to learn that wh-questions involve a wh-phrase superficially posit ioned in the specifier position within CP. I argue that the wh-in-C an alysis poses both developmental problems (in that it fails to account for child structures involving a preposed wh-phrase with an uninverted auxiliary) and potential theoretical problems (in that long movement of a wh-head may violate locality principles). I then consider two alt ernative accounts of wh-questions which posit that wh-movement involve s movement of a wh-phrase from the very earliest stages of development . The first of these is an adjunction account, on which wh-phrases are analysed as clausal adjuncts in Child English (adjoined to the Verb P hrase (VP) in the earliest stages and to the Inflection Phrase (IP) in later stages). I note, however, that this provides no principled acco unt of the absence of auxiliary inversion in child wh-questions, and p oses continuity problems (especially within a framework such as that o f Cinque (1990) in which it is assumed that wh-phrases never adjoin to VP or IP). Finally, I consider an alternative account on which initia l wh-phrases are analysed as occupying the specifier position within C P at all stages of development. I note that the problem posed by this analysis is accounting for the absence of auxiliary inversion in early wh-questions, and offer an account which posits that children overgen eralize specifier-head agreement from IP to CP.