Clifton Pye - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Clifton Pye

A proposal that further generalizes a rule in Government and Binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) is ex... more A proposal that further generalizes a rule in Government and Binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) is examined for its implications for acquisition of verb movement. Mark Baker's proposal extends the Move-alpha rule to posit that the head of any phrase may be moved to become incorporated into the head of any phrase that properly governs the phrase where the incorporating head originated. The study uses longitudinal data collected for four 2-and 3-year-old children acquiring K'iche'. It was found that by age 2.10 the children seemed to have acquired one construction involving verb movement, and to have begun using the causative construction. Additional observations concerning the relative acquisition of the verb constructions for each child and the applicability of the proposed model are made. The data are seen as providing tentative confirmation for the theory, pending study of many more details of the incorporation process. (MSE)

Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 2018

The ambiguous nature of clitics challenges simple distinctions between morphology and syntax. Cli... more The ambiguous nature of clitics challenges simple distinctions between morphology and syntax. Clitic properties also feature in theoretical accounts of ergativity. In this paper we analyze the nature of the person markers in Sorani Kurdish. The direct person markers are conventionally treated as verb affixes, while the oblique person markers are assumed to be clitics. A variety of clitic tests show that both the direct and oblique person markers have some affix properties as well as some clitic properties. The results illustrate the difficulty that language-specific features pose for a general theory of clitics.

Península, Nov 1, 2021

proto-maya a través del uso del método comparativo. Los lingüistas han usado el método comparativ... more proto-maya a través del uso del método comparativo. Los lingüistas han usado el método comparativo por más de cien años a fin de reconstruir la historia de lenguas y familias lingüísticas en todo el mundo. El análisis del lenguaje infantil de seis lenguas mayas compara los inventarios fonológicos en cada lengua y produce una fonología compuesta que identifica un núcleo fonológico común para cada una de las lenguas. Los resultados presentan los sonidos del núcleo de la fonología infantil a través de las seis lenguas y reconstruye el proto-maya que los niños hayan adquirido. Palabras clave: lenguaje infantil, método comparativo, fonología, lenguas mayas.

I compared the semantic extensions of cut and break verbs in Sorani and English in concrete and m... more I compared the semantic extensions of cut and break verbs in Sorani and English in concrete and metaphorical contexts. The results show that there is significant overlap between Sorani and English in the concrete and metaphorical objects that are used and not used with each verb. I investigated the LCS components of cut and break verbs semantically by providing four different semantic tests, three for durativity and one for intentionality. These tests provide semantic evidence for the CAUSE and PRODUCE components in the LCS of the verbs. The results show that the semantic features of the verb change depending on the features of the objects and whether they are in metaphorical or concrete contexts. Some Sorani verbs demonstrate different semantic components from English verbs in their meaning as they are used in different contexts with different objects. I compared the syntactic and semantic features of Sorani verb to determine the degree to which their syntactic properties correlate...

The absolutive voice is a fact of life for Guatemalan children who speak the Mayan language K'ich... more The absolutive voice is a fact of life for Guatemalan children who speak the Mayan language K'iche' and one that enters their verbal lexicon fairly early. Data suggest that by the time the children are 3-year-olds they have encountered several instances of verbs that alternate between act:_ve and absolutive forms, which may supply the evidence needed to formulate a general rule. Lack of errors in children's language production indicates that the children were extremely sensitive to the formal properties of the absolutive antipassive. They do not simply assume that every verb they meet in a transitive context is transitive. Yet, to acquire the absolutive antipassive, K'iche' children face three major hurdles. The first is learning that root transitive verbs can have intransitive forms, i.e., the absolutive alternation. The second is learning which verbs do not undergo the absolutive alternation. And the third is learning which intransitive verbs are root or derived. The last two problems cannot be solved from positive evidence alone. Nor are conservative acquisition procedures likely to be the explanation, given the propensity of children learning English to generalize bcyond verb forms they have already heard. While this report does not explain how K'iche' children formulate a properly restricted rule for the absolutive antipassive, it does show that the absolutive raises learnability problems of the same level as the English dative or causative. (RH)

Lingua, 2018

Systems of spatial reference have been explored by many scholars for evidence that language affec... more Systems of spatial reference have been explored by many scholars for evidence that language affects human thought. The main purpose of the current study is to describe how Balinese people living in the north side of Bali use their frames of spatial reference, and to look for evidence that language affects human spatial cognition. This study employs both linguistic tasks (e.g., object rotation and asking direction techniques) and non-linguistic tasks (e.g., rearrangement of objects). Fifty-one children and six Balinese monolinguals participated in this study. The results of the current study using object rotation, asking direction, and object rearrangement tasks involving the child subjects showed different results. Specifically, an absolute system of spatial reference is dominantly employed by the child subjects in both the object rotation and object rearrangement tasks. Although not dominantly applied, the use of a relative system was also observed in the two tasks. Interestingly, the later system was dominantly used in the asking direction tasks, which is likely affected by subjects' knowledge of the Indonesian relative system. The results exhibited by the child subjects show a developmental trend towards the use of the absolute system exhibited by the adult subjects in the three tasks.

The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, 2022

This paper describes the nature of the prelinguistic inter action which takes place between Mayan... more This paper describes the nature of the prelinguistic inter action which takes place between Mayan parents and infants, and something of the conceptual framework which underlies and supports the interaction. The study shows that North American middle-class patterns of infantcaretaker inter action are far from universal. This suggests that a cultural perspective is a prerequisite of an adequate theory of baby talk and language acquisition. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the implications such a cultural perspective holds for the study of child language. An Ethnography of Mayan Baby Talk with Special Reference to Quiché After such studies as Bruner (1975), Greenfield & Smith (1976), Snow (1977a) and Trevarthen (1977), researchers find it fashionable to consider the context in which language acquisition takes place. The interaction between infants and their caretakers provides the foundation for infants' success in reconstructing the speech forms of their community....

The acquisition of verb argument structure is the sine qua non of language acquisition. Children ... more The acquisition of verb argument structure is the sine qua non of language acquisition. Children must learn how many arguments each verb can possess as well as the way in which the verb's arguments may express different semantic relations. Knowledge of verb argument structure enables children to 'project' the syntactic structure of the basic clause as well as detect the absence of 'missing' NPs and reconstruct their referent. The two previous papers have presented some of the difficulties children face in acquiring verb argument structure. I will discuss the problem in the context of how children acquire the causative construction, focusing on the Mayan language K'iche', which is spoken by approximately 1 million people living in the western highland region of Guatemala. K'iche' has an agglutinating morphology which reflects the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs in several respects. The language has an ergative cross-referencin...

The objective of this study is to examine the use of the Masculine Sound Plural (MSP) as a defaul... more The objective of this study is to examine the use of the Masculine Sound Plural (MSP) as a default inflection in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Twenty-six fourth-year university students in the department of Arabic language and literature participated in the experiment and they were required to provide the plural inflection for 30 derived noun forms in MSA. The data used in this study consists of agentive derived forms that indicate human action meaning. The descriptive statistics approach (mean and standard deviation) was used to investigate the data; the results of the current study showed that MSP inflection was produced in a higher rate of frequency than the other possible forms of the irregular plural inflectional forms-broken plural (BP)-inflection that can also be actual part of the lexicon or schemata or background knowledge. The findings of this study support the accounts provided by the combinatorial processing mechanism with a suffixation formation that is more predictable...

Journal of Child Language, 2020

The outstanding property of human language is its diversity, and yet acquisition data is only ava... more The outstanding property of human language is its diversity, and yet acquisition data is only available for three percent of the world's 6000+ spoken languages. Due to the rapid pace of language loss, it may not be possible to document how children acquire half of the world's indigenous languages in as little as two decades. This loss permanently diminishes the scope of acquisition theory by removing its empirical base. In the face of pervasive language loss, the question of how best to document the language of the last children to acquire indigenous languages assumes critical importance. A collaborative effort by researchers is required to identify the most efficient procedures for documenting children's language, and share them worldwide. This paper makes the case for documenting diversity and outlines steps needed to accomplish this goal.

Visual Anthropology Review, 2002

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Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2009

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2016

The Jespersen Cycle (1917) remains the definitive example of the linguistic cycle. A reconstructi... more The Jespersen Cycle (1917) remains the definitive example of the linguistic cycle. A reconstruction of the history of negation marking in the Mayan languages shows that while some Mayan languages exhibit the beginning of a typical Jespersen Cycle, the majority of Mayan languages evidence different types of negation cycles. Differences in the domain of negation strengthening and the absence of postverbal negation strengthening provide evidence of the unique structure of Mayan languages. This evidence suggests that constraints on negation cycles are just as important as the cycles themselves in examining cross-linguistic variation in the structure of negation.

Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 2013

ABSTRACT This paper presents results of a comparative project documenting the development of verb... more ABSTRACT This paper presents results of a comparative project documenting the development of verbal agreement inflections in children learning four different Mayan languages: K’iche’, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek. These languages have similar inflectional paradigms: they have a generally agglutinative morphology, with transitive verbs obligatorily marked with separate cross-referencing inflections for the two core arguments (‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive’). Verbs are also inflected for aspect and mood, and they carry a ‘status suffix’ which generally marks verb transitivity and mood. At a more detailed level, the four languages differ strikingly in the realization of cross-reference marking. For each language, we examined longitudinal language production data from two children at around 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, and 3;6 years of age. We relate differences in the acquisition patterns of verbal morphology in the languages to 1) the placement of affixes, 2) phonological and prosodic prominence, 3) language-specific constraints on the various forms of the affixes, and 4) consistent vs. split ergativity, and conclude that prosodic salience accounts provide th ebest explanation for the acquisition patterns in these four languages.

Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 2002

Linguistics, 1990

Ergative languages have challenged the ingenuity of linguists for more than a century. This artic... more Ergative languages have challenged the ingenuity of linguists for more than a century. This article explores learnability problems associated with the acquisition of ergative languages. Traditionally, an ergative language is one which treats the subjects of intransitive verbs in the same way as the objects of transitive verbs. Languages may have rules which operate on a morphologically or syntactically ergative basis, but all languages are syntactically accusative to some extent. Both types of ergativity raise problems for language-acquisition theory. Children acquiring ergative morphologies must learn to distinguish between the subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs. Acquisition data suggest that children acquire ergative and accusative morphological systems equally easily. This finding supports a distributional learning procedure. Learnability considerations rule out the existence of syntactically ergative languages in the sense of Marantzs (1984) ergativity hypothesis. Unambiguous evidence of syntactic ergativity only appears in complex sentences; thus, children cannot use data within simple, active sentences to establish whether or not their language is syntactically ergative. Children acquiring languages with ergative syntactic constructions must learn when the direct object of a transitive verb functions as a syntactic pivot. Acquisition data for ergative syntactic constructions in K'iche' and Kaluli suggest that children initially fail to recognize ergative constraints on syntactic rules. This finding supports semantic bootstrapping as an acquisition mechanism for the initial construction of syntactic structure.

Journal of Child Language, 2013

ABSTRACTThis article demonstrates how the Comparative Method can be applied to cross-linguistic r... more ABSTRACTThis article demonstrates how the Comparative Method can be applied to cross-linguistic research on language acquisition. The Comparative Method provides a systematic procedure for organizing and interpreting acquisition data from different languages. The Comparative Method controls for cross-linguistic differences at all levels of the grammar and is especially useful in drawing attention to variation in contexts of use across languages. This article uses the Comparative Method to analyze the acquisition of verb suffixes in two Mayan languages: K'iche' and Yucatec. Mayan status suffixes simultaneously mark distinctions in verb transitivity, verb class, mood, and clause position. Two-year-old children acquiring K'iche' and Yucatec Maya accurately produce the status suffixes on verbs, in marked distinction to the verbal prefixes for aspect and agreement. We find evidence that the contexts of use for the suffixes differentially promote the children's product...