The Acquisition of Verbs and their Grammar: The Effect of Particular Languages

345 Pages·2006·3.71 MB·English

by  Natalia Gagarina

THE ACQUISITION OF VERBS AND THEIR GRAMMAR:
THE EFFECTOF PARTICULAR LANGUAGES
STUDIES IN THEORETICALPSYCHOLINGUISTICS
VOLUME 33
Managing Editors
Lyn Frazier, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Thomas Roeper, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Kenneth Wexler, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Editorial Board
Robert Berwick, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Matthew Crocker, Saarland University, Germany
Janet Dean Fodor, City University of New York, New York
Angela Friederici, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences,
Germany
Merrill Garrett, University of Arizona, Tucson
Lila Gleitman, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
Chris Kennedy, Northwestern University, Illinois
Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Howard Lasnik, University of Maryland, Maryland
Yukio Otsu, Keio University, Tokyo
Andrew Radford, University of Essex, U.K.
The titles published in this series are listed on www.springer.com.
THE ACQUISITION
OF VERBS AND THEIR
GRAMMAR:
THE EFFECT OF
PARTICULAR
LANGUAGES
Edited by
NATALIAGAGARINA
Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft,
Berlin, Germany
and
INSAGÜLZOW
Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft,
Berlin, Germany
AC.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4020-4336-9 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-4020-4334-5 (HB)
ISBN 978-1-4020-4335-2 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AADordrecht, The Netherlands.
www.springer.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2008 Springer
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
NATALIA GAGARINA AND INSA GÜLZOW 1
Part 1: Language-specific impact on the acquisition of Hebrew
SIGAL UZIEL-KARL 15
Acquisition of verb argument structure from a developmental
perspective: Evidence from Child Hebrew

SHARON ARMON-LOTEM 45
Subject use and the acquisition of verbal agreement in Hebrew
Part 2: Language-specific variation in the development of predication
and verb semantics
CHRISTINE CZINGLAR, ANTIGONE KATIČIĆ, KATHARINA
KÖHLER AND CHRIS SCHANER-WOLLES 71
Strategies in the L1-acquisition of predication: The copula
construction in German and Croatian

NATSUKO TSUJIMURA 105
Why not all verbs are learned equally: The Intransitive Verb Bias in
Japanese
Part 3: Stages in the development of verb grammar and the role of
semantic bootstrapping
ELLEN HERR-ISRAEL AND LORRAINE MCCUNE 125
Dynamic event words, motion events and the transition to verb meanings

DAVID INGRAM, ANNE WELTI AND CHRISTINE PRIEM 151
The early stages of verb acquisition in English, Spanish and German

PETER JORDENS AND CHRISTINE DIMROTH 173
Finiteness in children and adults learning Dutch
Part 4: Language-specific variation and the role of frequency
DAVID GIL 201
The acquisition of voice morphology in Jakarta Indonesian
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
INSA GÜLZOW AND NATALIA GAGARINA 229
Analytical and synthetic verb constructions in Russian and English
child language
Part 5: Language-specific and learner-specific peculiarities in the
developmen t of verbs and their grammar

MARILYN MAY VIHMAN AND MAIGI VIJA 263
The acquisition of verbal inflection in Estonian: Two Case Studies

CLAIRE MARTINOT 297
Grammatical role of French first verbs

DOROTA KIEBZAK-MANDERA 319
Speaker and hearer reference in Russian speaking children
Index 345
NATALIA GAGARINA AND INSA GÜLZOW
INTRODUCTION
The present volume contains selected papers from the conference on the
acquisition of verb grammar and verb arguments held at the Research Center
for General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin in November, 2001. The main aim of
this conference was to provide a forum for researchers studying the
(language-specific) acquisition of verbs and aspects of their grammar, such as
inflection, finiteness, argument structure, etc. Of particular interest were the
developmental processes at the interface of related components of verb
grammar, such as lexicon and morphology, semantics and syntax, etc.
Elucidating these issues should enhance our understanding of the
development of particular verbal systems and of specific languages impact on
this development.
The central role of the verb within a sentence has been acknowledged by
most grammatical traditions and it is nowadays accepted by the two most
prominent ‘poles’ in acquisition studies: the UG-based and the usage-based
acquisition theories. These two psycholinguistic theories reflect two basic
and opposed approaches to language. The first theory represents the most
elaborated formalist approach (and provides corresponding accounts for
language acquisition) while the second denies any principled difference
between competence and performance and takes into consideration functions
of the target language units the child has to acquire (cf. Newmeyer 2003 on
the knowledge and use of language). Usage-based approaches may be
generally characterized as emphasizing the crucial role of children’s
linguistic experience (in particular, frequency, statistical patterns, etc.) on the
development of grammar. Linguistic competence in these theories is seen as a
dynamic system which is continually shaped by linguistic usage events. The
role of rule-based linguistic representations at the early stages of language
development is downplayed in favor of constraint-based systems whose struc-
tural properties actually emerge from usage (cf. among others Barlow 2000,
Langacker 1987, Bybee 1995, etc.). Further, the communicative function of
language also plays a crucial role in these accounts. Thus, Tomasello (2003)
stresses that children focus on the acquisition of whole utterances an d
constructions, because utterances are“ the primary reality of language from a
communicative point of view ” (Tomasello 2003: 326).
1
N. Gagarina and I. Gülzow (eds.), The Acquisition of Verbs and their
Grammar: The Effect of Particular Languages, 1–11.
© 2008 Springer.
2 N. GAGARINA AND I. GÜLZOW
Formal theories, in contrast, tend to schematize a child language in terms
of very abstract categories and formal representations, and they start from the
premise that a child has (knowledge of) linguistic structures from birth. We
suppose that in the present state-of-the-art of language acquisition science
one cannot unequivocally and definitively solve the problems of this
discussion. It seems that different elements of the language faculty (and
extralinguistic reality) play more or less prominent roles in the different
levels of the acquisitional process and, consequently, diverse explanatory
mechanisms accounting for different phases in the acquisition of language,
may be of stronger or weaker force.
Despite the different views on the nature of language, both theoretical
approaches agree on the central role of verbs in a sentence and in the
grammar.1 The contributions comprising this volume come from different
theoretical backgrounds including the two contrasted above approaches and
cover a wide range of issues in verb grammar; they all address the main issue
of the book: the impact of specific languages on the acquisition of verbs and
their grammar. Language specificity causes variation from the onset of
children’s verbal behavior and affects the domains of (verb) grammar during
the whole course of language acquisition. Although empirical evidence is
given for both language-specific and more general processes (e.g. the develop-
mental stages) in the acquisition of verbs, language-specific performance is
more substantially observed and is registered from an age when the rule-
governed behavior of children is just starting to develop (cf. for example,
Bowerman and Levinson 2001, Naigles and Lehrer 2002). The contributors’
original empirical data show that rule-governed behavior and rule-based
accounts of the acquisition process become essential later in development, when
a certain number of abstract paradigmatic and syntagmatic operations have
already been mastered. Within this major topic, which constitutes the ‘red-
thread’ of this volume, several sub-issues define the further organization of
the contributions. The first deals with the bootstrapping effect, the second
explicates the role of frequency in the acquisitional process, and the third
compares learner-specific courses of development within a single language.
The main goal of the book is thus not to confront the different
acquisitional theories, but a) to bring more empirical longitudinal data on
various languages into the discussion and to show both similar and divergent
tendencies in these data, b) to show how different theoretical approaches
interpret these data and account for the development of language (use and
grammar), c) to demonstrate the validity of both approaches and their
potential for compatibility, and in this way move theoreticians forward in
their understanding of the phenomenon of language acquisition. The two
latter goals seem to be best achieved by investigating an issue which is
familiar to both theoretical approaches, namely, the development of
INTRODUCTION 3
language-specific competence within the acquisitional process. Together with
the focus on acquisition of the verb and its grammar research in this domain
provides a fruitful basis for discussion.
The maturation model of language acquisition assumes that UG becomes
the language specific grammar over time and that UG is entirely available
only up until the time when the native language has been completely acquired
(cf. Atkinson 1992, Wexler 1999). Constructivist models that may also be
opposed to theories of UG alongside with the usage-b ased approaches men-
tioned above mostly elaborate on the early acquisition of spatial relations (e.g.
Bowerman and Choi 2001, Sinha et al. 1999); however, two main hypo-
theses of this approach – a holistic view of universal spatial cognition and
the language specific acquisition hypothesis – are beyond the main scope
of this book.
The book presents original contributions based on analyses of naturalistic
data from eleven languages: Croatian, Dutch, English, Estonian, French,
German, Hebrew, Jakarta Indonesian, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. Three
of the contributions make cross-linguistic comparisons – between English
and Russian; English, German and Spanish; and German, Croatian and
English. All papers in the volume investigate first language acquisition and
one paper studies both first and second language acquisition. Different stages
of ontogenesis are presented as well: from the first words, when word classes
are not yet formed, to the period when children produce multi-word sentences
with subjects, objects, and complements, and when the morphology of verbs
can basically be said to have been acquired.
Part 1: Language-specific impact on the acquisition of Hebrew
The volume begins with two articles investigating Hebrew. The first one
treats verbal agreement from a generativist perspective and the second one
deals with the acquisition of verb argument structure from a constructivist
perspective. These two contributions thus represent opposing viewpoints and
reflect the ongoing debate on the nature of the acquisitional process:
‘grammar-discovery’ (e.g. Pinker 1984, 1989; Gleitman 1990) vs. ‘grammar-
construction’ (e.g. Tomasello 1992, 2003, Slobin 1995). Differences in
theoretical explanations of the language acquisition process have their roots
in the way that a researcher characterizes a target language. However, neither
approach denies the impact that language-specific aspects have on the
acquisitional process. While Uziel-Karl stresses the role of input and
language use, Armon-Lotem leaves this issue open. These two theoretically
different contributions show that the language-specific nature of Hebrew is
more strongly reflected in the later phases of the acquisitional process when
children move from concrete item-based entities to more general rule-based
structures. The authors agree on the fact that, in the beginning, children do
not possess grammatical knowledge about their language and either “restrict