"The Boy for the Cookie" – Some Evidence for the Nonviolation of the Case Filter in Child Second Language Acquisition

This article examines the developing second language (L2) grammar of Marta, a 4-year-old native speaker of Spanish, who acquired English as an L2. The evidence suggests that nonthematic properties such as Infl and Case systems appear to be operative from the very beginning in child L2 acquisition. Three types of evidence are presented. One piece of evidence relates to the early emergence of the copula. A second piece of evidence concerns verbless utterances containing for. I propose that there is an implicit verb in these utterances and that Case theoretic reasons force the movement of the postverbal object to a preverbal position. In this position, the object is assigned Case by for, which I propose is in Infl. A third piece of evidence concerns complement clauses of want. Although Marta has considerable difficulty in figuring out that want is an Exceptional Case Marking verb, the data suggest that she knows and obeys the Case Filter.