I really appreciated the leisurely pace and accessible tone of this writing, especially for someone who’s not super-familiar with the nuts and bolts of the Minimalist approach, but very interested in development. Here we can see one of the perks of not having a strict page limit. :)
Some other thoughts:
(1) One key idea of Developmental Minimalist Syntax (DMS) seems to be that the current bottom-up description of possible representations (which is what I take the iterated Merge cycles of the Minimalist approach to be) would actually have a cognitive correlate that we can observe and evaluate (i.e., stages of development). That is, this way of compactly describing acceptable/grammatical adult representations corresponds to an actual cognitive process (at the computational level of description, in Marr’s terms) whose signal can be seen in children’s developmental stages. So, this would support the validity (utility?) of describing adult representations this way.
(2) I didn’t quite follow the link between Minimalist Analytical Constructions (MACs) and Universal Cognition for Language. Is the idea that there are certain representations in the adult knowledge system, and we don’t care if their origin is language-specific? It sounds like that, from the text that follows.
Later on, MACs are described as children’s “toolkit for grammaticalizing their language”. Would this mean that the adult representations are what children use to make sense of (“grammaticalize”) their language? That is, the representations children develop allow them to parse their input into useful information. In my standard way of thinking about these things, the developed/developing representations that children have allow them to perceive certain information in their input (which then is transformed into their “perceptual intake” of the input signal).
In ch 3, part 4, we get a fuller definition: “grammaticalizing” means arriving at and encoding generalizations for the language. So, I think that’s compatible with my idea above that “grammaticalizing” has to do with the developing adult-like representations, and children parse their input with whatever they’ve already developed along the way.
(3) Thinking about acquisition as addition, rather than replacement: Just to clarify, children can have immature representations in one of two ways:
(1) a representation is immature because it’s still changing ([hug X] instead of [Predicate X]), or
(2) a representation is immature because it’s fixed into the adult-like state, but it’s only part of the full adult-like structure (e.g., VP) instead of the adult-like full structure [CP [TP [vp [VP ]]]]. This second version is talked about later in ch.3 a little in “mixed status utterances”, which can have an adult-like part and an immature part.
(4) Predictions for VP before vP (section 4.3): So, I think a prediction of DMS is that we shouldn’t generally see agentive subjects combining productively with verbs (which would be vP) before we see verbs combining productively with their objects (which would be VP). (Ex: Not “I put” before “put the ball” or “put down”, as a specific item.)
How would we then distinguish an item-specific combination that might seem to violate this from a language-general implementation involving that item that might seem to violate this? (That is, if we encounter “I put” before “put the ball”, how do we know if it’s an item-specific use or a productive language-general use?) Is it about where the child seems to be with respect to language-general use (e.g., productively using verbs with objects, but not subjects with verbs)? That is, we’d assume that an instance of “I put” would be item-specific and immature, but “put down” would be productive and general?
