My dissertation (PDF)is titled Parallel Architecture, Parallel Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Evidence from verbal and nominal domains.

This dissertation involves a comparative analysis of the acquisition of nominal and verbal morphosyntax in child learners of Estonian, Hungarian, and English. The starting assumption, in its simplest form, is that the feature is a fundamental linguistic primitive and the acquisition of language entails the acquisition of features. Although the acquisition of words, sounds, and meanings all involve features and are all crucial elements of understanding language learning, this dissertation focuses on morphosyntactic elements shared between the Determiner Phrase (DP) and the Complementizer Phrase (CP). Following the hypothesis that these projections have deep similarities, studying grammatical elements shared between the nominal and clausal domains serves to explore the features' independence from the particular lexical items they appear with. In particular, special attention will be paid to the acquisition of case-assignment, agreement and person/number representation, and subjects/possessors. Additionally, this comparison allows an examination of syntactic development through the analysis of the increasingly complex CPs and DPs.

This project has three goals. The first is to examine how and to what extent the theoretical parallels between the DP and the CP are reflected in the acquisition of these syntactic categories and the features they are composed of. The second goal is to better understand the role of features in acquisition. Formal approaches to language acquisition have long focused on the development of the functional aspects of language; this study aims to discuss the development of these functional aspects in terms of their component features rather than assuming a pre-existing set of functional categories. Finally, the comparison of three different languages in these terms will allow for conclusions to be drawn regarding how particular morphosyntactic differences between languages are reflected in the acquisition process.

The morphysyntactic descriptions of the language will show how, despite a great deal of morphological variation, the underlying syntactic operations are quite similar. The analyses of each individual language's children will show quite similar syntactic and morphological development. Though there are some significant time scale differences between children, the overall path looks the same within a language. The comparative study, on the other hand, indicates that while syntax develops similarly both cross-linguistically and in the CP and DP, morphological development is strongly affected by the details of the particular language and projection. These differences will be used to evaluate various formal approaches to acquisition and explore limiting factors in linguistic development.

Estonian, Hungarian, and English were chosen for a variety of reasons, both theoretical and practical. For the relevant aspects of CP/DP morphosyntax the languages have enough in common to be comparable, but enough differences exist between them that meaningful conclusions might be drawn from that comparison. Specifically, all three have morphological agreement, similar person/number paradigms, and morphological case, though the agreement facts range from rather simple in English to quite complicated in Estonian and the case systems vary greatly in their details. Additionally, Estonian and Hungarian are relatively understudied languages, making their study an important contribution to the body of acquisition work, yet they are not so obscure that there is not also a body of theoretical work to rely on in the analysis. Though many languages fit this description, these three have the final benefit of being well-represented in the CHILDES corpora, allowing a thorough examination of acquisition for all three during the crucial period of morphosyntactic development.

This dissertation is organized as follows: Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical frameworks, summarizes a variety of formal approaches to language acquisition, and describes the motivating DP-CP parallels. The subsequent three chapters discuss the details of DP and CP morphosyntax and their acquisition in Estonian (Chapter 2), Hungarian (Chapter 3), and English (Chapter 4), respectively. The fifth and final chapter (Chapter 5) compares and contrasts the language-specific results and their significance to language acquisition.