Why the Acquisition of Raising Seems to Matter

While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is perhaps less widely recognized that by examining the time course of language development we can integrate the study of language into the broader study of biological development. The hope persists that this type of analysis will play a role in the genetic underpinnings of language, as it has already done in some areas of grammar. 1 One area of grammar notorious for demonstrating late development involves various kinds of long-distance dependencies. In their comparative analysis of the development of different linguistic structures, Borer and Wexler (1987) argued that structures containing A-chains develop late.2 We will base our study on more up-to-date and empirically correct versions of Borer and Wexler’s A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH), but the logic is the same: certain grammatical representations allowed by Universal Grammar (UG) are ungrammatical for young children because of constraints imposed by their particular biology as opposed to adult biology. The basic argument for such maturation is Borer and Wexler’s (1987) “Triggering Problem ” (Babyonyshev, Ganger, Pesetsky and Wexler’s (2001) “Argument from th