Children’s Grammatical Conservatism

A growing number of studies suggest that children are “grammatically conservative”: At least in their spontaneous speech, children do not begin using a new syntactic structure productively until they have both determined that the structure is permitted in the adult language, and identified the adults’ grammatical basis for it. This study provides two new pieces of evidence for children’s Grammatical Conservatism (GC): one from the acquisition of the Go-Verb construction in American English, and the other from children’s fragmentary answers to prepositional wh-questions in English and Spanish. The findings suggest that children’s GC is operative even for inflection, and that there is at least one case in which GC overrides the general tendency of young children to omit function words. Keywords: grammatical conservatism; go-verb construction; prepositional questions; preposition stranding; fragmentary answers; ellipsis; sluicing; acquisition of English; acquisition of Spanish