This paper provides an optimality-theoretic explanation of how and why children produce a variety of systematic ungrammatical sentences in the process of language acquisition, focusing on the auxiliary verbs and verbal tense system in the sentence.
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This paper provides an optimality-theoretic explanation of how and why children produce a variety of systematic ungrammatical sentences in the process of language acquisition, focusing on the auxiliary verbs and verbal tense system in the sentence.
I proposed that the seemingly complicated ungrammatical sentences in auxiliary verb acquisition of children can be nicely accounted for within the framework of optimality theory.
I concluded that the children's ungrammatical sentences are produced as a natural consequence of misranked hierarchy of constraints applicable to the auxiliary verb acquisition process. In addition, I attempted to show that the optimality theory is superior to any other existing grammatical theories in that it explains the complicated motivation of producing ungrammatical sentences according to the ages of the children.