Root Infinitives, Tense, and Truncated Structures in Dutch

In this article, I distress the syntactic properties of child Dutch root infinitives (RIs) in light of recent findings concerning the structure of adult Dutch. The data examined offer support for those analyses that treat RIs in terms of truncated structures and speak against proposals that interpret RIs as root CPs. In the discussion I focus on one analysis representative of the truncation approach, namely, that developed by Rizzi (1993; 1993/1994), and on one analysis representative of the CP approach, that developed by Boser, Lust, Santelmann, and 'Whitman (1992), which is specifically adapted to the Germanic verb-second (V2) languages. This research is based on a corpus of production data for the child, Hein, from ages 2;4 to 3;1, obtained from CHILDES (MacWhinney and Snow (1985), coders: Wijnen and Boers).