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Title:
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'Piecemeal Paths to Grammatical Productivity': How children become productive with basic event constructions
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Author:
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Kirsten Abbot-Smith
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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email.eva.mpg.de/~smith
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Manchester
, Department of Psychology
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Degree Date:
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2003
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Language Acquisition
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Subject Language(s):
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English
German, Standard
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Director(s):
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Michael Tomasello
Elena Lieven
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Abstract:
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This thesis examines how English and German children become productive with basic event constructions involving the semantic roles of agent or patient. The approach taken is the usage-based/emergentist view, which argues that children learn abstract constructions very gradually, initially showing partial or lexically-specific productivity with basic event constructions (e.g. Tomasello, 2000; Goldberg, 1999; Langacker, 2000).
Generative researchers have argued that the semantic-syntactic mapping involved in event constructions is acquired with the aid of certain innate grammatical categories and principles. This leads to predictions against the gradual development of productivity within a particular aspect of grammar and against early lexical-specificity (e.g. Radford, 1997; Weissenborn, 1999). However, the three empirical studies conducted for this thesis found evidence for early lexical-specificity and for a gradual increase in productivity with event constructions.
The first study, taken together with previous findings by Akhtar (1999), found that English-speaking children show a gradual increase in productivity with subject-verb word order between 2;4 and 4;4 when it is used to mark the agent of active sentences. The second study was a training study, carried out in order to investigate whether shared syntactic distribution, semantic analogy and input frequency play a crucial role in the development of productive transitive constructions by English-speaking 2;6-year-olds. The third study was a longitudinal dense corpora study of the acquisition of the two German passive constructions. It supported the 'construction conspiracy hypothesis' that children will become productive with a grammatical construction more quickly if they have previously learned related constructions.
These findings are used as a basis for further discussion on the nature of early lexical-specificity and graded representations, and the role of the grammar network, semantic analogy, distributional analysis and input frequency in the acquisition of event constructions.
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