Children's Knowledge of Verbal Inflection and LF Raising: New Evidence from Elicited Production of VP Ellipsis Structures

First-language acquisition of English verb phrase ellipsis is investigated in children's (N = 28, aged 2:7-3:11) elicited imitation of elided & expanded coordinated sentences. Across all age groups, children produced more match responses for elided sentences than for expanded sentences. The analysis of the spontaneous changes children made to the stimulus sentence shows that there were more conversions of expanded to elided sentences than vice versa. Children also changed the verbal inflection, mostly omitting the inflectional morphology. Verb changes were most often made in the elided sentences & mostly in the first clause. There were more inflection errors in verbs in the second clause of expanded sentences than in elided sentences. A proposed syntactic analysis of verb phrase ellipsis posits disassociation of the inflectional morphology from the verb at the level of interpretation as evidenced by the lack of inflectional morphology on the verb in the children's production. 3 Tables, 4 Figures, 1 Appendix, 10 References. S. Godjevac