Recent research on the acquistion of subordination in German, Swiss German, and French has shown that there exists an early stage where children systematically do not use conjunctional (i.e. complementizer-introduced) subordinate clauses. However, one interesting observation is that children at a very early age (around the age of 2;0,0)(2) make productive use of what we will refer to as preconjunctional subordinate clauses, that is, clauses that lack the target complementizer. Interestingly enough, some children mark subordination by verb placement, or they use dummy place holders in positions where a complementizer would otherwise be placed Dummy place holders are undifferentiated items like schwa and nasals or forms that have a correspondence in the target system. These observations indicate that the underlying syntactic structure of preconjunctional subordinate clauses does not involve truncation. In the present paper we will argue that child grammar is a complete licensing system at anl? stage of development. One factor determining the licensing system of early subordinate clauses is that the acquisition of subordination involves language- and item-specific components that are beyond the capacity of early syntactic bootstrapping and thus inaccessible for the child at the early stage. This gives rise to a drastically reduced licensing system for Comp. We will argue that the obligatory rule of complementizer insertion is applied by the child only after the feature content of the syntactic position Comp is fully specified (the language-specific feature content of Comp with regard to Infl).
