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Productive inventory and case/agreement contingencies: a methodological note on Rispoli (1999)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2001

CARSON T. SCHÜTZE
Affiliation:
UCLA

Abstract

Rispoli (1999) suggests that previous studies arguing for a contingency between the case of subject pronouns and the presence/absence of verbal agreement in the acquisition of English (e.g. Schütze, 1997) suffer from methodological problems, and presents new data that fail to support earlier findings. I show that Rispoli's methodology unnecessarily biases his study against finding the predicted contingencies: it fails to take account of children's productive lexical inventory of pronoun forms. As a result, syntactic versus morphological sources of error fail to be distinguished. I explain why this distinction is crucial within the AGR/Tense Omission Model, and clarify its predictions.

Type
NOTE
Copyright
2001 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I thank two anonymous reviewers and Elena Lieven for their comments on a previous version of this paper. This work was supported by a UCLA Academic Senate grant.