Introduction
This book considers the phenomenon of non-nominative subjects in the speech of children acquiring English. Ito systematically shows that the attested deviance in pronominal forms arises from the “child-unfriendly” verbal systems peculiar to English, making it possible to assume a feature checking mechanism identical to the adult mechanism. Using this analysis, Ito explains not only the child production of non-nominative subjects, but also the much more restricted distribution of legitimate non-nominative subjects in the adult grammar. She further demonstrates that the default pronoun is structurally licensed in two ways. The ranges of topics discussed includes the acquisition of inflectional marking and Case system in a cross linguistic perspective, the notion of “default,” the grammar of clauses (with emphasis on subjunctives, Mad Magazine sentences and Belfast English), and the nature of morphosyntactic operations in general.
