Ku Waru Clause Chaining and the Acquisition of Complex Syntax

Abstract

How do children learn to understand and use complex syntactic constructions? In English, Diessel (2004) shows that they do so in two different ways. Complex sentences with dependent clauses (e.g., "Peter promised that he would come") develop out of simple sentences that are gradually expanded into multi-clause ones. Complex sentences with coordinate clauses (e.g., "He tried hard, but he failed") develop by integrating two independent sentences into a single two-clause unit. Here we expand on that research by focusing on the acquisition of a kind of complex syntactic structure which involves both dependency and coordination-the clause chain-in Ku Waru, a Papuan language spoken in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Clause chains are constructions coordinating multiple clauses in sequence, where the non-final or "medial" clauses are in a dependent relationship with the final clause. One function of clause chains, which is often taken to be the prototypical one, is to refer to a series of events in sequence. Some Ku Waru clause chains do refer to sequential events. Other Ku Waru clause chains containing particular verbs refer to single events, sometimes with the particular verb providing aspectual or adverbial qualification ("keep doing," "do quickly," etc.). In this article, we track the acquisition of several different kinds of clause chains based on longitudinal recordings of four children acquiring Ku Waru as their first language between the ages of 1½ and 5. We show that, although there are differences among the children in the ages at which they acquire the various kinds of clause chain, all four of them follow the same series of steps in doing so. In conclusion, we compare our findings to Diessel's for English. We find that they are similar in some ways and different in others, which may be related to the differences between subordinate constructions, coordinate non-dependent constructions and coordinate-dependent constructions.

The Acquisition of Clause Chaining in Nungon

“…TO’s three earliest spontaneous two-clause chain productions include one wholly non-conventionalized clause chain, one Continuous aspect construction, and one clause chain using the common pairing of ‘taking it up’ and ‘go.’ Further, TO’s medial verb types counts ( Table 1 ) show no indication that she relies on a very small number of lexical verbs for her chains. Findings here therefore diverge slightly from those for Ku Waru by Rumsey et al (2020) in that Nungon-speaking children’s earliest clause chains are a mix of more and less conventionalized lexical combinations, and there is no indication for Nungon that early chains should be analyzed as involving a single action, rather than two (If this were the case, findings for Nungon clause chain development could be compared to those for early clausal subordination in languages like English and German: Diessel, 2004 ; Brandt et al, 2008 ).…”

“…Research into child acquisition of complex sentences has rarely examined the development of sentences comprising more than two clauses. The Nungon data here accords with the Ku Waru data in Rumsey et al (2020) , in that children acquiring these two Papuan languages clearly produce only two-clause chains for a period before beginning to produce chains of more than two clauses. Thus, at least for clause chains in these two languages, children can be said to go through a ‘two-clause stage,’ after which their clause chains expand in length to three clauses (for the Ku Waru children and TO), or more (for Niumen, whose two-clause stage is followed by a stage in which he produces chains of 3–5 clauses).…”

“…In Ku Waru as in Nungon, medial verbs must indicate whether the subject of the following clause will differ from that of the present clause. But Rumsey et al (2020) state that Ku Waru adult discourse shows a strong dispreference for DS clause chains, and this is also reflected in the makeup of child-directed speech. Accordingly, only one of the children in Rumsey et al’s (2020) study of early Ku Waru clause chain productions ever produces a DS clause chain, and this production occurs at 4;7, over 2 years after the child began producing SS clause chains.…”

Scaling Processes of Clause Chains in Pitjantjatjara

“…It is an intriguing question for further research whether these differences relate to differences between the languages or between the methods used to investigate them. Some researchers have suggested that clause chains and other similar syntactic constructions may have been exoticized in the literature with a focus on less typical examples [29], [30]. It is possible that impressionistic studies may have been influenced by this bias.…”

Beyond the Two-Clause Sentence: Acquisition of Clause Chaining in Six Languages

“…The marked developmental delay in production of different-subject clause chains by children acquiring Ku Waru and Pitjantjatjara can be attributed in large part to the very low proportions of different-subject clause chains in child-directed adult speech in these languages. In most Ku Waru transcripts, 100% of adult clause chains involve a single subject that is maintained throughout the chain (Rumsey et al, 2020). Pitjantjatjara is similar; all but one adult clause chain token in the sample were same-subject (Defina, 2020).…”