Optimality Theory and the Development of Do-Support in Children’s Wh-Questions

Abstract

This study aims to explore where-, how-, and why-questions produced by young L1 English-speaking children and to account for how children develop wh-questions within Optimality Theory (OT). For this purpose, the data have been collected from the Child Language Data Exchange System database. The analysis showed that where-questions were produced earlier than how- and why-questions and that early where-questions tended to fail subject-auxiliary inversion in the early stages. Another finding is that children produced howquestions with subject-auxiliary inversion even when howquestions started to be attested. To account for the developmental differences observed in the data, I propose an OT analysis. This study shows the applicability of OT to syntactic language development and demonstrates that OT provides a unified account of the development of wh-questions by reranking the same constraint set. Moreover, a developmental difference shown in wh-phrases can also be accounted for by assuming that the constraint, Operator in Specifier (OP-SPEC), can be divided into sub-constraints.