Case marked pronouns in English have received an increasing amount of attention from child language researchers from a Constructivist or Usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000; 2003; Kirjavainen et al., 2009) and also from a Generativist perspective (Schutze & Wexler, 2000; Rispoli 1998). However, genitive-for-nominative errors specifically, have received less attention. A detailed Corpus Analysis investigated English-speaking children’s my-for-I pronoun case marking errors. The results revealed no direct link between frequency of my in the input either independently or as part of a larger construction and children’s my-for-I error rates. However, the modelling of the pronominal system was found to be related to children’s error rates. Children receiving mostly pronouns in the input, in contrast to a high proportion of proper name replacement, were found to have a lower rate of errors. Further, children with a less entrenched use of I, before their error period, were those who made a higher my-for-I error rate. Further analysis revealed an association between the function of agency, control and possession in children’s erroneous uses of my as subject in verb phrases. An experimental study with two and a half and three and half year old children found that a range of pronoun case marking errors were being made alongside the correct use of I in both age groups. No age differences were found for the rate of correct I-verb utterances. This shows that children do not go through a period of time 100% making a certain error type and then change to 100% correct I, but that actually both forms are accessible and will compete for use. Within the study the claiming of agency and control was in focus, which elicited a high level of protest from the children. Analysis revealed that the children as young as two and a half were capable of protesting normatively, making use of normative language to show their awareness of the game rules and how things “should” be done. Further, developmental differences showed that the younger children may not be as sophisticated as the older children in altering their protest, according to context. This development trend shows that children may be learning more linguistic forms, but their understanding of when it is necessary to use them, may not yet be as advanced, in two year old children. This current thesis supports a Constructivist or Usage-based perspective of language acquisition. The importance of input, function and competition between forms has been exemplified. If children assign a form-function mapping between agency, control and possession and the form my, they are likely to make a higher level of error in these contexts. This error rate is then increased if the modelling of the pronominal system is low and not offering a high level of correct use of my and I, to compete with this erroneous mapping. This lack of modelling plus a lower entrenched use of I from the outset, will mean this competition will therefore be won out more often and for longer by this incorrect my form.

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The dominant aim of this thesis is to define a concept of natural expression the precise extension of which is left undetermined, being subject to empirical investigation. Nevertheless, paradigm examples with respect to which the question is raised: 'Are they natural expressions?' include smiling and other facial expressions. In pursuit of this aim suggestions are made concerning the logical form of sentences about expression (expression is not, in my view, best regarded as a relation), comparisons are drawn between the interpretation of utterances and the interpretation of non-linguistic expressions (and both contrasted to explanation), and, subsequently, between the latter and what Davidson calls the 'causal redescription of actions'. The task of defining expression is then conceived of as partly consisting in the specification of the cognitive effects such that when an action is truly described 'in terms of' them, it is expressive. In the ensuing analysis, much of the work is done by adapting Christopher Peacocke's notion of 'prima-facie evidence'. The notion of 'physiognomic perception', ie. the way in which we see eg. anger in eg. a scowl, is critically discussed and related to the foregoing. The relevance of correlations between emotion and behaviour to natural expression is then assessed. In the penultimate chapter I argue that expressive behaviour is natural if there exists innate dispositions to exhibit it under certain conditions and innate capacities to interpret it correctly. The relevance of this to radical interpretation, concept-acquisition, and the explanation of action is considered. The contributions of some social scientists to this area are critically examined and broad prescriptions are made concerning the nature of the evidence to be taken into account in determining the naturalness of a given type of behaviour. I conclude with a tentative endorsement and formulation of 'immanent realism' with respect to other minds.

Each of the three main chapters of this thesis is concerned with a different style of theorising about the semantics of natural language and in particular with the way they would tackle expressions of modality. What unites the three approaches is their commitment to the study of a language through a systematic theory which will account for all its sentences, according to some general principle such as: meaning = truth conditions. They diverge widely on the implementation of this idea, ie. on the aims and form of a theory of meaning. The first promises a very spartan hind, of theory; there is therefore considerable interest in discovering how such an austere method will manage to handle the intricacies of intensionality. To this end several ways of coping are examined, in the first chapter. The second approach permits itself a much richer means of describing the semantics of a language. Consequently, the concern of the second chapter is not so much with coping, as with marshalling these more powerful resources into a detailed analysis of some of the linguistic manifestations of modality. The third approach is, as yet, more often critical than constructive. It seeks to replace theories of the first two kinds, founded on what it sees as an unjustified realist metaphysics, with a more cognitive semantics. In the course of the thesis, different manifestations of modal concepts within sentences of natural language are examined, ranging from the 'outermost', sentential operator occurrences to the 'innermost' occurrences where the modality is interwoven into the property expressed by a simple predicate. Thus in the last chapter, the import of the criticisms raised by the third approach is assessed with special reference to dispositional predicates.

This project investigates acquisition of a new language by example. Syntax induction has been studied widely and the more complex syntax associated with Natural Language is difficult to induce without restrictions. Chomsky conjectured that natural languages are restricted by a Universal Grammar. English could be used as a Universal Grammar and Punjabi derived from it in a similar way as the acquisition of a first language. However, if English has already been acquired then Punjabi would be induced from English as a second language.

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In recent years, researchers have tended to use structural priming to distinguish between the core predictions of nativist and constructivist theories of syntax acquisition. Although this has been useful for our understanding of what early syntactic knowledge is like, this focus on children’s initial representations, rather than on the process of development, means that it is still unclear how children’s syntactic knowledge becomes adult-like. To address this issue, this thesis used structural priming to investigate the role of the verb in the development of syntax. In particular, the present work explored how two lexical effects - verb overlap and verb bias – influence structure choice in children and adults for dative and transitive structures. A number of conclusions were drawn: First, the present work revealed there to be a complex relationship between knowledge about syntactic structure and knowledge about verbs; children as young as three have already formed abstract representations of the dative structure, but have also already begun to learn the syntactic preferences of dative verbs. Thus, it was concluded that neither nativist nor constructivist theories can fully explain the abstract and lexical patterning of children’s early syntactic knowledge. Second, the findings showed that experience with verbs is important for the strengthening of verb-structure links across development. Third, the present work indicated that adults seem to track the frequency with which verbs occur in their syntactic structures, and that this knowledge can affect the way in which these syntactic representations are stored and activated. The implications of these findings for theories of syntactic development are discussed, and future directions for research are considered.