Locality and Intervention in the Acquisition of Greek Relative Clauses

Abstract

According to the most recent formulation of Relativized Minimality, grammatical features are distinguished between those that are syntactically active and those that are not. Under this view, only the first play a role in the computation of locality. Furthermore, whether a certain feature is +/− syntactically active is determined by language-specific factors. Gender is one of the grammatical features that has been argued to have different values in Hebrew vs. Italian, and as a result, to play a role only in Hebrew-speaking children’s comprehension of relative clauses, in terms of intervention effects. Amidst this backdrop, this paper focuses on gender and case, and examines whether or not they have similar effects in the comprehension of relative clauses by Greek-speaking children. Greek differs from Hebrew in that gender does not qualify as a syntactically active feature, hence, the prediction is that it should behave like case, which does not qualify as syntactically active either. The paper presents results from a novel study showing that, indeed, neither gender nor case are responsible for intervention effects in the comprehension of relative clauses by Greek-speaking children, although both features are robustly expressed in Greek nominal morphology.

Keywords

• case
• gender
• relativized minimality
• relative clauses
• acquisition