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Uninterpretable features and EPP: a minimal account of language build up and break down

Platzack, Christer LU (2005) In Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 75.
Abstract
Like most L2 speakers, speakers of early L1, children with SLI, and Broca’s aphasics lack the or¬dinary speaker’s ability to produce utterances on line with almost no errors. Often they produce well-formed utterances, but quite frequently they produce errors that are almost non-existent in the speech of normal grown-up speakers. In my paper I will suggest, based on empirical material from Swedish, that this behavior can be understood as a performance problem: these speakers have the same knowledge of the target language as ordinary speakers, but cannot automatically adjust their produc¬tion to the language specific distribution of EPP, i.e. the demand to express a particular gram¬matical relation overtly. To obtain this I adopt an idea put... (More)
Like most L2 speakers, speakers of early L1, children with SLI, and Broca’s aphasics lack the or¬dinary speaker’s ability to produce utterances on line with almost no errors. Often they produce well-formed utterances, but quite frequently they produce errors that are almost non-existent in the speech of normal grown-up speakers. In my paper I will suggest, based on empirical material from Swedish, that this behavior can be understood as a performance problem: these speakers have the same knowledge of the target language as ordinary speakers, but cannot automatically adjust their produc¬tion to the language specific distribution of EPP, i.e. the demand to express a particular gram¬matical relation overtly. To obtain this I adopt an idea put forward by Pesetsky & Torrego (2001) that EPP is to be distin¬guished from the grammatical relation itself: EPP is connected to an uninter¬pretable feature, forcing Agree and Move to apply to avoid a violation of the interface condition.

The distribution of EPP is language specific, hence my account correctly predicts cross-lan¬guage variation for the four groups of speakers discussed here. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
organization
publishing date
type
Working paper/Preprint
publication status
published
subject
keywords
SLI, Aphasics, L2, L1, features, EPP, Acquisition
in
Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax
volume
75
pages
31 pages
publisher
Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University
ISSN
1100-097X
project
TEJS
language
English
LU publication?
yes
additional info
The information about affiliations in this record was updated in December 2015. The record was previously connected to the following departments: Swedish (015011001)
id
05f8af47-d29f-42ae-a9c2-24ab1088293d (old id 601634)
date added to LUP
2016-04-01 16:27:09
date last changed
2018-11-21 20:41:31
@misc{05f8af47-d29f-42ae-a9c2-24ab1088293d,
  abstract     = {{Like most L2 speakers, speakers of early L1, children with SLI, and Broca’s aphasics lack the or¬dinary speaker’s ability to produce utterances on line with almost no errors. Often they produce well-formed utterances, but quite frequently they produce errors that are almost non-existent in the speech of normal grown-up speakers. In my paper I will suggest, based on empirical material from Swedish, that this behavior can be understood as a performance problem: these speakers have the same knowledge of the target language as ordinary speakers, but cannot automatically adjust their produc¬tion to the language specific distribution of EPP, i.e. the demand to express a particular gram¬matical relation overtly. To obtain this I adopt an idea put forward by Pesetsky &amp; Torrego (2001) that EPP is to be distin¬guished from the grammatical relation itself: EPP is connected to an uninter¬pretable feature, forcing Agree and Move to apply to avoid a violation of the interface condition.<br/><br>
	The distribution of EPP is language specific, hence my account correctly predicts cross-lan¬guage variation for the four groups of speakers discussed here.}},
  author       = {{Platzack, Christer}},
  issn         = {{1100-097X}},
  keywords     = {{SLI; Aphasics; L2; L1; features; EPP; Acquisition}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Working Paper}},
  publisher    = {{Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University}},
  series       = {{Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax}},
  title        = {{Uninterpretable features and EPP: a minimal account of language build up and break down}},
  volume       = {{75}},
  year         = {{2005}},
}