compressed phonological form in production: e.g. want, gon (l going), can,
can’t and don’t may all have the compressed form QnQ, so leading to
indeterminacy in how to gloss a sequence like < go. It may therefore be hasty
to conclude that children who produce such fillers have not acquired the
relevant lexical items: on the contrary, they may have a reasonable under-
standing of the syntactic and semantic properties of such items, but have a
reduced phonological representation of them; or indeed, they may alterna-
tively have a relatively full phonological representation of them, but reduce
them in production via the kind of phonological operations embodied in
Smith’s () (e.g. going might be reduced to gbn via
vowel reduction, gn via vowel loss, and n via cluster simplification or < via
fusion).
By the same token, in using words like we may also run the risk of
seriously underestimating the level of syntactic knowledge which a child has:
for example, since a variety of items can be reduced to schwa in rapid
colloquial speech in adult English (including unstressed forms of I and are),
it may be that the schwa which Bloom (, pp. –) reports Kathryn
producing at ; in utterances such as b pull represents a reduced nominative
I subject, and likewise that the schwa in db dirty represents a reduced form
of are (as in They’re dirty): if so, it would follow that Kathryn has already
acquired (at least part of) the case\agreement system of English. The
problem posed by reduced forms like schwa is compounded by the possibility
that many more items may be reduced to schwa in child grammars than in
adult grammars: to cite further data from Bloom (, passim) when Eric
at ; says b made b fit, in may be that the first schwa represents I and the
second it; when he says This b fit, the schwa may represent one (or perhaps
will); when he says b man sit, it may be that schwa represents a reduced form
of the; likewise, when Kathryn at ; says b more milk, it may be that schwa
represents have (or want) – and so on. The issue of whether (e.g.) children
have distinct phonological representations for items such as a and the or can
and will may ultimately only be resolvable on the basis of carefully designed
experimental studies.
In much the same way, using a term like to denote expressions
like unna (for ‘I wanna’) may once again seriously underestimate a child’s
syntactic competence. After all unna might (as in adult English) simply
represent a contracted form of I want to, with I reduced to schwa (l here
spelled as u), want reduced to n (here spelled as nn), and to reduced to schwa
(here spelled as a); alternatively, unna may represent a contracted form of φ
want to, where φ is the kind of null subject which Rizzi () terms a null
constant. If unna does indeed represent (I) want to, we would expect to find
that the verb following unna is always in the bare infinitive form (so that we
find Unna go home but not *Unna to go home or *Unna going home). Analysing
forms like unna as ‘rote-memorized and unsegmented’ items poses serious
v.Walther
