Early Verb Constructs in Spanish Eugenia Sebastián, Pilar Soto & Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole Universidad Autónoma de Madrid & University of Wales Bangor 1. Introduction In recent work on the development of language one central issue has been whether or not children's first constructions in language are productive. Do children have knowledge of a general nature regarding morphological and syntactic patterns or is their knowledge lexically specific? On the one hand, many researchers working within a UG framework have proposed that young children have relatively complex, productive systems early on, at least in languages different from English (e.g. Hyams 1996, for Italian; Hub Faria, Fretias, Soares, Ramos, & Batores 1999, for Portuguese). These studies suggest that children have a knowledge of structural and semantic relations between verbs and verbal structures. Thus, for example, for a transitive verb like draw, children would have some knowledge about the fact that the action involves both an agent and a patient. If we paraphrase this idea in terms of linguistic description, we would say that the action involved by the verb requires the presence of two participants or arguments. One participant is the subject of predication (subject argument) and the other is the complement of the verb (object argument). On the other hand, other researchers have proposed that children use limited scope formulae and lexically-based patterns (e.g., Tomasello 1992, Pine & Lieven 1993, Pizzuto & Caselli, 1994). Children's knowledge does not consist of abstract rules, but more superficial, item-specific knowledge. Children start to place verbs in a somewhat restricted way; that is, the child restricts a specific verb to a particular argument structure or structures during the first two years of life, with no 'consistent' word order across verbs (Tomasello, 1992). Somewhat between these two extremes, some authors have suggested that children have productive knowledge at an 'intermediate' level. For example, Choi (1998, 1999) has argued that Korean-speaking children use verbs predominantly with 'core arguments' and in a 'preferred word order'. Before the age of two, they follow an OV order for transitive verbs, and SV for intransitive verbs. Therefore, her data support the 'verb-island' proposal only for a brief period. (See Pine, Lieven & Rowland 1998 with regard to English.) The goal of this paper is to explore this issue with data from Spanish- speaking children. Spanish has a rich inflectional system of suffixes on verb roots to encode person, number, tense/aspect, and mood. (See Gathercole,