The present study examines how children vary perspective in describing events. In particular, it investigates how children describe events that deviate from prototypical transitive events. Cross-linguistic research suggests that speakers of various languages organize particular linguistic devices around clusters of related notions such as volition, animacy, and control (see Comrie ). Prototypical transitive events include an agent who acts intentionally to bring about a perceptible change of state in an object. Deviations from this scene have been noted to be marked by deviations from canonical morphosyntax marking the prototypical transitive scene. Previous research suggests that children reserve the use of specific linguistic devices to mark prototypical transitive scenes in the earliest phases of grammatical development (see Budwig 1986Budwig , 1989Slobin 1981Slobin , 1985 for further discussion). Cross-linguistic research suggests that children acquiring distinct languages first give special linguistic attention to scenes involving prototypical agents. Whether children also mark deviations from the prototypical transitive scene has received little attention (see Budwig 1986Budwig , 1989 for further discussion of children's early linguistic treatment of prototypical agentivity and various deviations). The present paper will examine how children acquiring English as a first language make use of particular voice contrasts to shift perspective away from the prototypical transitive scene. It will focus in particular on the use of the passive construction.
An influential claim in the child language literature posits that children use structural cues in the input language to acquire verb meaning (Gleitman, 1990). One such cue is the number of arguments co-occurring with the verb, which provides an indication as to the event type associated with the verb (Fisher, 1995). In some languages however (e.g. Hindi), verb arguments are ellipted relatively freely, subject to certain discourse-pragmatic constraints. In this paper, we address three questions: Is the pervasive argument ellipsis characteristic of adult Hindi also found in Hindi-speaking caregivers' input? If so, do children consequently make errors in verb transitivity? How early do children learning a split-ergative language, such as Hindi, exhibit sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic influences on argument realization? We show that there is massive argument ellipsis in caregivers' input to 3-4 year-olds. However, children acquiring Hindi do not make transitivity errors in their own speech. Nor do they elide arguments randomly. Rather, even at this early age, children appear to be sensitive to discourse-pragmatics in their own spontaneous speech production. These findings in a split-ergative language parallel patterns of argument realization found in children acquiring both nominativeaccusative languages (e.g. Korean) and ergative-absolutive languages (e.g. Tzeltal, Inuktitut). #
The present study examines the relationship between linguistic forms and the functions they serve in children's early talk about agentivity and control. The spontaneous linguistic productions of six children ranging between 1;8 and 2;8 served as the data base. Preliminary analyses of who the children referred to and what forms were used in subject position suggest that the children could be divided into two groups. Three children primarily referred to Self and relied on multiple Self reference forms in subject position, while the other children referred to both Self and Other and primarily used the Self reference form, I. A functional analysis was carried out to examine whether the seemingly interchangeable use of Self reference forms could be related to semantic and pragmatic patterns. The findings indicate that at a time before they regularly refer to others, the children systematically employed different Self reference forms to mark distinct perspectives on agency.
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