Acquisition of Passives: A Semantico-Pragmatic Approach
Abstract
This paper presents a general review of literature in terms of acquisition of passives as well as providing new theoretical insights considering the semantics and pragmatics of passives, which are thought to be the underlying reasons of difficulty. There is a disagreement in the literature as to whether passive structures are difficult and if so, what may be the underlying causes of this difficulty. Based on the arguments presented in the literature, the syntactic hypothesis (Wexler 2004) and the incremental processing hypothesis (Trueswell and Gleitman 2004) stand out. Wexler’s syntactic hypothesis is that children regard all vP’s and CP’s as strong phases, which makes non-grammatical passives for them, which is the source of the difficulty. In the meantime, in both cases (syntax or incremental processing), frequency plays a major role in boosting the acquisition process by either making children be faster at reassigning thematic roles, which is the source of difficulty according to incremental processing hypothesis, or making children be aware of the fact that vPs are not strong phases, thereby making passives grammatical, so that children can use them. Finally, in this study, a theoretical analysis based on semantic and pragmatical perspectives is presented to explain why passive structures are difficult to acquire in some languages because the studies on passive structures in the literature neglect the meaning component. In this study, the introspective semantics model (Von Fintel and Heim 2011) was used to provide a new theoretical perspective on the acquisition of passive structures.
Keywords
Kaynakça
- Alcock, K. J., Rimba, K., & Newton, C. R. (2012). Early production of the passive in two Eastern Bantu languages. First Language, 32(4), 459-478.Allen, S., Crago M. (1996). Early passive acquisition in Inuktitut. Journal of Child Language 23(1). 129–155.Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model. The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing, 3, 73-112.Bates, E., MacWhinney, B., & MacWhinney, B. (1987). Competition, variation, and language learning. Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, 157-193.Bencini, G. M. L., Valian V. (2008). Abstract sentence representation in 3-year-olds: Evidence from comprehension and production. Journal of Memory and Language 59. 97– 133.Borer, H., Wexler K. (1987). The maturation of syntax. In Thomas Roeper & Edwin Williams (eds.), Parameter Setting and Language Acquisition, 123–172. Dordrecht: Reidel.Borer, H., Wexler K. (1992). Bi-unique relations and the maturation of grammatical principles. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 10. 147–189.Bresnan, J., Mchombo, S. (1987). Topic, pronoun, and agreement in Chichewa. Language 63. 741–782.Brooks, Patricia & Michael Tomasello. 1999.Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs. Developmental Psychology 35(1). 29–44.Chomsky, N. (2001). Derivation by Phase. In M. Kenstowicz (ed.) Ken Hale: A life in language. 1- 52. Cambridge: MIT Press.Demuth, K. (1989). Maturation and the acquisition of the Sesotho passive. Language 65(1). 56–80.Embick, D. (2004). On the Structure of Resultative Participles in English, Linguistic Inquiry 35(3).Fox, D., Grodzinsky, Y. (1998). Children’s passives: A view from the by-phrase. Linguistic Inquiry 29(2). 311–332.Gordon, P., Chafetz, J. (1990). Verb-based versus class-based accounts of actionality effects in children’s comprehension of passives. Cognition, 36(3), 227–254.Hirsch, C., Wexler, K. (2006). Children’s passives and their resulting interpretation. In The proceedings of the inaugural conference on generative approaches to language acquisition–North America, University of Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics (Vol. 4, pp. 125-136).Huang, Y. T., Zheng, X., Meng, X., Snedeker, J. (2013). Children’s assignment of grammatical roles in the online processing of Mandarin passive sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 69(4), 589-606.Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M., Cymerman, E., Levine, S. (2002). Language input and child syntax. Cognitive Psychology, 45(3), 337.Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva M., Shimpi P. (2004). Syntactic priming in young children. Journal of Memory and Language 50. 182–195.Kline, M., Demuth, K. (2010). Factors facilitating implicit learning: The case of the Sesotho passive. Language acquisition, 17(4), 220-234.Messenger, K., Branigan, H. P., McLean, J. F., Sorace, A. (2012). Is young children’s passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(4), 568-587.Savage, C., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., Tomasello, M. (2003). Testing the abstractness of children’s linguistic representations: Lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children. Developmental Science, 6(5), 557.Stromswold, K. (1996). Does the VP-internal subject stage really exist? Paper presented at the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.Trueswell, J., Gleitman, L. (2004). Children’s eye movements during listening: Developmental evidence for a constraint-based theory of sentence processing. The interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world, 319-346.Wexler, K. (2004). Theory of Phasal Development: Perfection in Child Grammar. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 48, 159-209.
Ayrıntılar
Birincil Dil
İngilizce
Konular
-
Bölüm
Araştırma Makalesi
Yazarlar
Sercan Karakaş
0000-0002-1813-351X
Türkiye
Yayımlanma Tarihi
30 Ekim 2019
Gönderilme Tarihi
26 Ağustos 2019
Kabul Tarihi
26 Ağustos 2019
Yayımlandığı Sayı
Yıl 2019