Covert A-Movement In Child Serbo-Croatian: Evidence From The Involuntary State Construction

Abstract

The involuntary state construction in Serbo-Croatian involves covert A-movement of the theme argument to the subject position, and is therefore predicted to be a problematic acquisition for children younger than five by both the A-chain Deficit Hypothesis (Borer and Wexler 1987, 1992), and the Universal Phase Re.quirement hypothesis (Wexler 2004). However, these predictions are contradicted by the results of this study. Since the involuntary state construction has no syntactic homophones, we conclude that the ability to represent A-chains resulting from covert movement of theme arguments is not dependent upon biological maturation.