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Title:
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Possession and Spatial Motion in the Acquisition of Ditransitives
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Author:
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Joshua Viau
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.cog.jhu.edu/postdocs/viau/
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Degree Awarded:
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Northwestern University
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2007
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Psycholinguistics
Syntax
Language Acquisition
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Subject Language(s):
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English
Kannada
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Director(s):
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Jeffrey Lidz
Stefan Kaufmann
Sandra Waxman
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Abstract:
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What is the nature of the relation between a verb and its arguments? In
this dissertation, I look to evidence from language acquisition for answers.
Any theory of ditransitives must explain certain structural asymmetries
noted for both double-object (DO) datives (e.g. Alfonso gave Derrek the bat)
and prepositional datives (Alfonso gave the bat to Derrek) (e.g. Barss &
Lasnik 1986) as well as subtle but persistent meaning differences
distinguishing the two dative constructions in many languages. A particular
approach to argument realization, Harley (2002), does both. In Harley’s
approach, structural asymmetries arise from the hierarchical nature of the
dative verb phrase, in which the first dative object asymmetrically
c-commands the second in both constructions. In addition, the semantic
facts fall out from the presence of primitives encoding possession in
DO-datives (HAVE) and location in prepositional datives (GO) that are
embedded in these syntactic representations. I show that the structural
asymmetries and meaning differences that have been observed for adults
obtain for children as well, confirming Harley’s general approach.
Concerning the structural asymmetries, a series of experiments using the
Truth Value Judgment task reveal that four-year-olds already have
hierarchical representations within the dative verb phrase, much as adults
do. This finding is based on converging evidence from Principle C and
quantifier-variable binding in English and quantifier-variable binding in
Kannada. The Kannada data in particular suggest that c-command (not linear
order) guides children’s interpretive preferences. Moreover, concerning
meaning differences, a large-scale corpus study reveals that two-year-old
English-speaking children demonstrate awareness of distinct possessional
and spatial meaning in DO-datives and prepositional datives, respectively,
in their earliest productions.
These results add to the considerable body of work illustrating the
abstractness of children’s early linguistic knowledge. I argue that the
dative representations that children evidently have are not learnable if
learning is construed inductively as the building up of rules and
structures based solely on cues present in the input. Rather, the available
evidence appears to favor deductive learning, whereby children are led to
discover innately specified syntactico-semantic structures as a result of
careful observation of what datives mean.
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