Possessor extraction in child English: A Minimalist account

This paper argues that 4 to 6 year-old English-speaking children have
access to a parametric value that makes the following structures possible
in their grammar:

(1)	a.	Who do you think -s fish is in the cradle?
	b.	Who do you think -s Spiderman saved cat?

We suggest that child questions in (1) are derived via extraction of the
wh-possessor who from the whose-phrase. Our argument rests on the studies
that explore the syntax of questions with wh-possessives in a variety of
languages (e.g. Tzotzil, Hungarian, Slavic, Germanic). These studies
suggest that questions with wh-possessives can appear in one of the three
forms: (a) a wh-possessor is obligatorily extracted; (b) a wh-possessive is
obligatorily pied-piped; (c) a wh-possessor is optionally extracted. We
attested exactly these three patterns in our child data. The paper presents
an analysis of children's questions in (1) and discusses its implications
for the Subset Principle.

Key words: language acquisition, wh-possessive phrases, possessor
extraction, the Subset Principle.