3 An important question remains as to whether any part of the continuation of the
derivation permits the nominal element within the subject to be the structurally
closest lexical item to C. See Kitahara (2011) for a detailed discussion of this issue.
4 See Gualmini and Crain (2005) for evidence from children’s knowledge of the
interaction between the semantic property of downward entailment and the
structure-dependent notion of c-command.
5 Other major challenges include the study by Lewis and Elman (2002), who
constructed a simple recurrent network to model question formation in English.
For a critical discussion of Lewis and Elman’s statistical-learning approach, see
G ualmini (2004) and G ualmini and Crain (2005).
6 Stromswold (1990) analyzed the transcripts of 14 English-speaking children avail-
able in the CHILDES database and found that the overall inversion rate for yes/
no questions was 93.7%. This high rate of inversion, according to Stromswold,
suggests that no child had a grammar which prohibited inversion.
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