%0 Journal Article
%T Complement or adjunct? The syntactic principle English
%A Anat Ninio
%J First Language
%@ 1740-2344
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0142723717729276
%X In children acquiring various languages, the early mastery of determiners strongly predicts syntactic development. What makes determiners important is not yet clear as there is a linguistic controversy regarding their syntactic behaviour. Some consider determiners to be similar to adjectives and to modify common nouns, while others consider the common nouns their complements. This article aims to find out which of the two basic syntactic operations, complementation or adjunct attribution, children learn when they master determiner每noun combinations in their early speech. Pearson correlations of determiner每nominal combinations with verb每noun combinations and attributive adjective每noun combinations were computed in early two-word-long sentences of a large sample of young English-speaking children. Determiner每nominal combinations were very highly correlated with verb每noun sentences, whereas the correlation with adjective每noun combinations was much lower. It appears that determiner每noun combinations are a type of complementation. When children learn them early, they apparently learn the syntactic principle underlying such combinations which then can be transferred to other syntactic constructions
%K Adjunction
%K complementation
%K dependency grammar
%K determiners
%K syntactic development
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0142723717729276