During language acquisition children often produce forms that are
unattested in standard adult
language. Among these forms, we find commissive errors, defined in
Alexiadou, Guasti and Sauerland
(2021) as overt realizations of some complex conceptual structure that
is ‘compressed’ in adult language.
Drawing on corpus data on causative and comparative marking in child
French and English, we show that
one common class of errors involves redundant, multiple exponence
(ME).We argue that redundant errors
reflect an attempt by the child to obey two competing principles,
Maximize Exponence and Minimize
Exponence. Furthermore, these cases of ME also occur across word
boundaries, providing evidence in
favour of syntactic models of morphology. We present two possible
analyses of multiple exponence in
child language, involving spanning in Nanosyntax and Fusion in
Distributed Morphology.