Chapter 5. On the acquisition of event culmination (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
In this paper we investigate if there is a connection between the acceptance of non-culmination in child language and a seemingly similar phenomenon in certain adult languages. In Mandarin, among other languages, adults accept telic-perfective clauses for non-culminating situations. The types of verbs that allow such readings are referred to as non-culminating accomplishments. Recently, novel developments in semantic theory have established that subject type plays a role in the acceptance of non-culmination in these languages. According to the Agent Control hypothesis (Demirdache & Martin 2015), denying the result as encoded by such accomplishment verbs is easier when the subject’s referent is an intentional Agent than when it is an inanimate Cause. Our study revisits non-target-like acceptance of non-culmination in learners by asking: does non-culmination in child language reflect the same cause as non-culmination in languages like Mandarin?
Interpreting resultative sentences in German: Stages in L1 acquisition
Linguistics, 2000
This article presents the results of a study on the interpretation and acceptance of adjectival resultatives of German children between 6 and 9 years of age and adults. These results brought to light significant differences, due to age, in the interpretation and acceptance of these resultatives, that is to say, sentences with an adjective in the final position. The youngest participants were prone to accept ungrammatical sentences by assigning a resultative meaning. The ungrammaticality of the sentences in question was not due to semantic inconsistencies but to violations of the selectional properties of verbs, as for instance in *die Kinder erschrecken die Katze ängstlich 'the children frighten the cat scared'. In contrast, the adults rejected or amended those sentences. The conclusion is (a) that the children seemed to rely on the sentence structure as a primary cue to compute the meaning of an utterance and (b) that, in contrast with adults, the youngest children in particular had not yet learned the relevant semantic properties of verbs that determine the selectional restrictions and thus the syntactic options of verbs. This means that differences in interpretation and acceptance of sentences are due to differences in knowledge of semantic verb properties between adults and children. The relevant semantic knowledge increases in gradual stages during language acquisition.
An Event Structure Account of English Resultatives
Language, 2001
Current syntactic accounts of English resultatives are based on the assumption that result XPs are predicated of underlying direct objects. This assumption has helped to explain the presence of reflexive pronouns with some intransitive verbs but not others and the apparent lack of result XPs predicated of subjects of transitive verbs. We present problems for and counterexamples to some of the basic assumptions of the syntactic approach, which undermine its explanatory power. We develop an alternative account that appeals to principles governing the well-formedness of event structure and the event structure-to-syntax mapping. This account covers the data on intransitive verbs and predicts the distribution of subject-predicated result XPs with transitive verbs.* * We have presented parts of this article in a number of settings, and we are grateful to the audiences for their questions and comments. We thank the many people who have discussed this work with us or who have commented on earlier written versions, especially Bill Croft, David Dowty, and Steve Wechsler. We also thank Mark Aronoff and three referees for their thoughtful suggestions. We are indebted to Lena Goretskaya, Dana Lossia, Jeanette Ortiz, and Saundra Wright for their help with collecting, organizing, and coding the collection of attested resultatives that served as a basis for this study.
Verb semantics and the acquisition of tense-aspect in L2 English
Studia Linguistica, 2000
Studies on the L2-acquisition of Tense-Aspect (TA) have argued that the emergence and development of verb morphology is constrained by semantic-conceptual prototypes in a way that coincides with the claims of the Aspect Hypothesis (AH) . This paper presents results from a longitudinal study of the development of TA in L2 English which suggests that the influence of such prototypes is itself constrained by other factors, notably L1-induced predispositions to mark specific temporal categories, the morphophonemic nature of different grammatical categories, and the nature of the processing mechanisms that operate in the learning of grammatical morphology.
Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages
Linguistics
The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children’s non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children’s non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. ...
Acquiring perfectivity and telicity in Dutch, Italian and Polish
Lingua, 2008
This paper presents a crosslinguistic study into the acquisition of form-to-meaning correspondences in the domain of aspect. How may form affect the acquisition process and how may meaning do so? The results from aspectual comprehension experiments with Dutch, Italian and Polish L1 learners reveal that both form and meaning properties affect the acquisition path and lead to developmentally different patterns across languages. The semantics of perfective aspect is acquired earlier than imperfective aspect. Moreover, there is a surprising discrepancy in the understanding of perfective aspect. Whereas Dutch and Polish children have acquired the completion entailment of their Present Perfect and Perfective aspect respectively by the age of 3, Italian 3-year-olds perform at chance with their Present Perfect. These results do not support the hypothesis of Uniformity of Aspect Acquisition, which claims that certain aspectual notions (in particular, perfective aspect) are acquired around the same age independent of the language-specific encoding. Instead I put forward an acquisition theory of form-to-meaning correspondences that is sensitive both to form-Morphological Salience, namely, the idea that the semantics of morphologically salient paradigms is acquired early-and to meaning-Semantic Complexity, namely, the idea that the semantics of simple aspectual operations is acquired early.