The articles of this collection cover a wide range of formal syntactic and semantic phenomena. The focus is on a broad array of developmental syntactic phenomena, including topics in Argument Structure and Clause-Internal Syntax, the DP Domain and Learning Theory. In total, the contents of the volume illustrate ways in which theoretically informed linguistic research can explain language behavior in terms that are motivated on independent grounds and point towards new research opportunities to test theoretical claims about the adult model of grammar. The contributions of this volume are...

This book explains a well-known puzzle that helped catalyze the establishment of generative syntax: how children tease apart the different syntactic structures associated with sentences like John is easy/eager to please. The answer lies in animacy: taking the premise that subjects are animate, the book argues that children can exploit the occurrence of an inanimate subject as a cue to a non-canonical structure, in which that subject is displaced (the book is easy/*eager to read). The author uses evidence from a range of linguistic subfields, including syntactic theory, typology, language...