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This book explains a well-known puzzle that helped catalyze the establishment of generative syntax: how children tease apart the different syntactic structures associated with sentences like John is easy/eager to please. The answer lies in animacy: taking the premise that subjects are animate, the book argues that children can exploit the occurrence of an inanimate subject as a cue to a non-canonical structure, in which that subject is displaced (the book is easy/*eager to read). The author uses evidence from a range of linguistic subfields, including syntactic theory, typology, language processing, conceptual development, language acquisition, and computational modeling, exposing readers to these different kinds of data in an accessible way. The theoretical claims of the book expand the well-known hypotheses of Syntactic and Semantic Bootstrapping, resulting in greater coverage of the core principles of language acquisition. This is a must-read for researchers in language acquisition, syntax, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.

Language acquisition. --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- Language and languages --- Syntax --- Animacy (Grammar) --- Acquisition of language --- Developmental linguistics --- Developmental psycholinguistics --- Language development in children --- Psycholinguistics, Developmental --- Interpersonal communication in children --- Psycholinguistics --- Animacy. --- Syntax. --- Animateness --- Grammatical categories --- Acquisition --- Frames (Linguistics) --- Linguistics. --- Substitution frames (Linguistics) --- Syntactic frames (Linguistics) --- Linguistic analysis (Linguistics) --- Linguistic science --- Science of language

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This paper proposes a new theory of why null-subjects of finite verbs are produced by young children developing a non-null-subject language. We first show that one of the extant theories, Topic-Drop, isn't supported. Modifying ideas proposed in Rizzi (2006), we assume that finite null-subjects arise in the specifier of a root TP, and may be null as the result of phasal computation. But we reject the idea that the selection of a root is an arbitrary, parametric process. Using new work in syntactic theory that relates information structure (namely undistinguished subjects) to root Tense Phrases

Generative grammar --- Language acquisition --- English language --- Acquisition --- Generative grammar. --- Language acquisition. --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- Grammar, Generative --- Grammar, Transformational --- Grammar, Transformational generative --- Transformational generative grammar --- Transformational grammar --- Psycholinguistics --- Acquisition of language --- Developmental linguistics --- Developmental psycholinguistics --- Language and languages --- Language development in children --- Psycholinguistics, Developmental --- Interpersonal communication in children --- Acquisition. --- Derivation --- Germanic languages --- English language - Acquisition