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The syntax of questions in child English

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary Government-and-Binding (GB) reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima & Bellugi's classic 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- questions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head complementizer (C) position within the Complementizer Phrase (CP) (so blocking auxiliary inversion if this involves positioning an inverted auxiliary in C) and that in the transition to Adult English, children come to learn that wh-questions involve a wh-phrase superficially positioned in the specifier position within CP. I argue that the wh-in-C analysis 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 alternative accounts of wh-questions which posit that wh-movement involves 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 Phrase (VP) in the earliest stages and to the Inflection Phrase (IP) in later stages). I note, however, that this provides no principled account of the absence of auxiliary inversion in child wh-questions, and poses continuity problems (especially within a framework such as that of Cinque (1990) in which it is assumed that wh-phrases never adjoin to VP or IP). Finally, I consider an alternative account on which initial wh-phrases are analysed as occupying the specifier position within CP 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 overgeneralize specifier-head agreement from IP to CP.