{"pk":6859,"title":"Wh- Movement in Child Catalan","subtitle":null,"abstract":"This study examines the production of wh-questions in the speech off our monolingual child speakers of Catalan who were recorded longitudinally as part of the study carried out by Serra & Sole, obtained from the CHILDES Data Base (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985). In this data all wh-questions produced appeared to be adult-like, in contrast with the non-adult-like production of this construction in child English, Swedish, Dutch and German. However, there is an initial period in which no wh-questions at all are produced, in spite of the fact that other aspects of syntax, such as negation, clitic-placement and complementation seem adult-like in this same period. During this \"no wh-question\" period, there is a concomitant absence of verbal tense morphology, with the exceptions of present and irrealis forms (imperatives, root infinitives, root gerunds and root participles). Interestingly, the onset of wh-questions appears to correlate with the onset of a much wider variety of tense morphology. Given this observation and Rizzi's (1991) hypothesis that wh-questions and tense morphology are crucially linked in adult syntax, I propose that the early absence of wh-questions is a consequence of the early underspecification of tense.","language":"en","license":null,"keywords":[{"word":"Applied Linguistics"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sk776ph","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"John","middle_name":"","last_name":"Grinstead","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Northern Iowa","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2010-07-22T03:00:00-04:00","date_accepted":"2010-07-22T03:00:00-04:00","date_published":"2001-06-30T03:00:00-04:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/ial/article/6859/galley/3958/download/"}]}