Acquisition of relative clauses in Lithuanian

This dissertation is an experimental investigation of how Lithuanian children acquire restrictive relative clauses. Since no previous work has been devoted to the acquisition of Lithuanian relatives, from the empirical point of view, the results of this research fill a gap in the literature. From the theoretical point of view, the findings contribute to our understanding of language acquisition and syntactic theory.;A total of three experiments were carried out with Lithuanian speaking children between the ages of 3 and 7. For two of the experiments, the data were gathered using an elicited production task in which appropriate contexts for elicitation of relative clauses were supported with toy props (following Crain and Thornton 1998). The third experiment provided appropriate contextual support for relative clauses, but this experiment was an elicited imitation task.;The findings show that children as young as 3 produce relative clauses using the relative pronoun 'kuris'. This is a departure from the findings of experimental studies carried out on other languages, where the relative pronoun was shown not to be used by children until age 6. Moreover, the results indicate that children produce a variety of relative clauses; some are target-like and some are not, but all of them represent grammatical options attested in some natural language. The differences concern the position of the head noun with respect to the relative pronoun: whereas in adult language the head noun must precede the relative pronoun, in child language it may follow it, and in fact it may occur in more than one position in the clause.;Following Kayne's (1994) raising analysis of relative clauses and Chomsky's (1995) copy theory of movement, I argue that children's grammar differs from adults' grammar in two respects. It allows the head noun to move out of the DP that contains it (headed by 'kuris') and remain inside the IP; and, instead of deleting the lowest copies of a moved element, it exhibits variation in which copies get deleted. The data and the analysis illustrate the important role that studies of acquisition play in uncovering the nature of the human grammatical system.