It turns out that something snuck into homework 4 that I didn’t really prepare you for. We haven’t really talked much about the “Minimal Trees” hypothesis, at least in the specifics that are relevant for the last question. There are some citations there to things in Lydia White’s textbook, though it’s not crucial that you go find those, we’ve talked about most everything.

The main thing that is relevant for this on the homework is that the Minimal Trees hypothesis has two parts: first, the syntactic structure starts out sort of small, with just the VP and no higher functional projections, and then progresses through development to add more structure. The second part is the idea that at the beginning, the parameter settings that are available to a tree that is just a VP are transferred from the first language, but not settings that pertain to the higher part of the tree (since there is no higher part of the tree right at the beginning). The question at the end is asking about how well the pattern shown by the data (from Dutch-speaking students progressing in French) can be understood in terms of the Minimal Trees hypothesis vs. in terms of something like the “full transfer, full access” hypothesis.

We’ll wind up talking about it tomorrow, but try to think about it anyway based on what I just said above.