Chapter 3. Learnability issues in VPE and focus

In the preceding chapter, I showed that VPE is a complex issue, involving syntactic licensing conditions and discourse/semantic identification conditions. If understood as deletion, along the lines of recent work, it involves the PF interface and therefore the syntax/phonology interface. By its discourse properties, VPE indirectly relates to focus. In this chapter, I present the main questions for acquisition that are raised by what we know about VPE and its interaction with focus, I report the results of preceding research on the acquisition of VPE and focus, and I define the working hypotheses of this dissertation.