Ken Wexler's paper is an important contribution both to the theory of verb movement and to the theory of language acquisition. I will briefly discuss the significance of this work with respect to the view that linguistic analyses are carried out at early stages without benefit of functional categories. The bulk of the commentary will be devoted to exploring the details of Wexler's analysis of the optional infinitive stage in English. Wexler proposes two analyses for this stage. The first treats the child and adult's grammar on a par, claiming that verb lowering applies in each case. We will see that while this analysis is descriptively adequate, it carries the cost of having to explicitly mark matrix indicative clauses as untensed. This flies in the face of the fact that matrix indicatives are always related to a moment of speech in the tense structure of adult grammars. The second analysis treats child English as a verb-raising language like French, Dutch, or German. We will see that this analysis faces some descriptive problems that can be solved by claiming that the projection of object agreement (AGRo) is missing at the early stages of language development in English. We will show that the simple assumption that AGRo is missing at early stages explains Borer & Wexler's (1987) observation that the child cannot form A-chains while dispensing with the extra theoretical assumptions that they invoke.