Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry

This chapter presents a multi-pronged argument, from a generative syntactic perspective, against the notion of ‘incomplete acquisition,’ centered on subjunctive usage by Spanish heritage speakers in New York City. Special attention is paid to the distribution of the subjunctive in futurate cuando clauses and in causative and permissive constructions with hacer and dejar . It is argued that the distribution of the subjunctive in second-generation speakers of Spanish in New York City is different