Ways of Avoiding Intervention: Some thoughts on the development of object relatives, passive, and control

This chapter addresses a child-adult grammar gap by considering the central notion of 'intervention': the child cannot compute a local relation across an intervener close enough in structural type to the target of the relation. In fact, this follows from the general locality principle, called Relativized Minimality, initially proposed by Luigi Rizzi in 1990, also holding for adult grammars. The hypothesis concerning language acquisition by the child is that the intervention effect can be avoided through the adoption of certain structural strategies that become accessible only at later stages in development. The chapter presents two cases discussed in the authors' previous work, which involve different adult strategies avoiding intervention: object relatives and passive. It then turns to control and attempts to trace back subject control to a similar explanatory scheme. © editorial matter and organization Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Robert C. Berwick 2013 © the chapters their several authors 2013. All rights reserved.