In the CHILDES lab, you’re looking for non-subject wh-questions mostly, which means you need to be able to distinguish those wh-phrases that are subjects and those that are not. For a verb like “eat” it’s pretty straightforward. The subject does the eating, the object gets eaten. When the verb is “to be” however, it becomes …
Another question I was asked concerns the interpretation of an utterance like “I want to get . get milk in it”. There are two things here: First, at least when I looked at it, I took that to be a kind of disfluency, so I didn’t really treat this as two distinct instances of “get”. …
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I’ve had a couple of questions about what to do with “What my got?” in the search for null subjects. My answer to this is: I would count this as an example of an overt subject. The fact that the pronoun is the wrong one doesn’t matter for the purpose of differentiating overt vs. missing …