The root nominal stage: a case study of early Nungon verbs

Sarvasy, Hannah S.

doi:10.1017/s0305000919000357

Cited by 14 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(23 reference statements)

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“…Very occasionally the Ku Waru children in our sample use Medial verbs in independent clauses (that is, in an utterance that contains only one verb; not a clause chain). This is relevant to note in connection with discussions in the child language literature of an "optional infinitive stage" of language acquisition, in which infinitives function as predicates in independent clauses (Rizzi, 1994;Hoekstra and Hyams, 1998;Wexler, 2011;Grinstead et al, 2014;Sarvasy, 2019). Across the entire Ku Waru child corpus for this study, such independent Medial verbs account for only 0.59% of the number of children's verbs 17 .…”

Section: The Presence Vs Absence Of Medial Verb Markingmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…The following analyses compare the children's production of Medial verbs with specific reference to whether or not they are suffixed. This is of interest, as the Ku Waru children's use of Medial/medial verbs differs sharply from that in Nungon, another Trans New Guinea language (Sarvasy, 2019). We will return to this shortly.…”

Section: The Presence Vs Absence Of Medial Verb Markingmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Clause chains have not yet been the object of any detailed acquisition studies (although cf. Sarvasy, 2019; and this collection). Our second aim is to develop some implications of those findings for the general understanding of the acquisition of complex syntaxan area of inquiry that has so far been based mainly on studies of English and a few other European languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

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Ku Waru Clause Chaining and the Acquisition of Complex Syntax

2020

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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.

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Section: The Presence Vs Absence Of Medial Verb Markingmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: The Presence Vs Absence Of Medial Verb Markingmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

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Ku Waru Clause Chaining and the Acquisition of Complex Syntax

2020

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“…While multi-speaker constructed clause chains are attested in conversation between adults and between adults and children in the Papuan language Nungon (Sarvasy, 2015(Sarvasy, , 2017, these are generally limited in length to two turns. With the exception of the special case of a parent prompting a child to repeat a clause chain, clause by clause, as in the Nungon child speech corpus (Sarvasy, 2019b), the vast majority of clause chains in Nungon conversation begin and end within a single turn by a single speaker. A typical Nungon clause chain is in (3); while this comes from a monolog narrative, its length and structure are well-attested in conversation as well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A case study of Nungon verb acquisition (reported in Sarvasy, 2019b) showed that medial verbs consistently represent between 14 and 31% of all verb tokens in adult speech directed at one child, aged 2;1-3;3. By age 3;3, the child herself was producing medial verbs in similar proportions to her parents.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Narrative Past Inflection in Sesotho Child and Child-Directed Speech

2019

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This study investigates a low-frequency verbal inflection called the "narrative past" in child and child-directed speech in the Bantu language Sesotho. Since the function of the Sesotho narrative past is not well-described, this study aimed to illuminate both function and acquisition trends in the Demuth Sesotho Corpus (Demuth, 1992). The narrative past form has been assumed to be under-specified for tense, comparable in function to the better-known Swahili-ka-inflection. The Swahili form, in turn, has been said to function in "clause chains" that are functionally and structurally similar to such chains in Papuan and other languages. We expected that, if the Sesotho narrative past is indeed functionally similar to Swahili-ka-, its distribution in child-directed speech and acquisition by children may pattern similarly to tense-less verb forms in non-Bantu clause chaining languages such as the Papuan language Nungon, where such verb forms can comprise over 20% of all verb tokens in child-directed and child speech at age 3;3. This study thus examined the conversational interactions of four children acquiring Sesotho in a village setting, aged 2;1-4;7. All 492 tokens of the narrative past form were coded for syntactic and discourse categories. Results show that the Sesotho narrative past generally occurs in much "looser" discourse chains than the clause chains of languages like Nungon; for Sesotho, other turns or elements can intervene between narrative past-framed mentions of previously-introduced topics. Further, the Sesotho narrative past has very low frequency in both child and child-directed speech, representing <3% of all verb tokens for both registers. There is possible evidence that one of the target children uses the Sesotho narrative past in increasing proportions as his linguistic sophistication increases, but there is no significant corresponding proportional increase in child-directed speech. Thus, in function and distribution, in both child-directed and child speech, the Sesotho narrative past form differs greatly from tense-less forms in more canonical clause chaining languages.

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Quantifying clause chains in Nungon texts

Sarvasy

2021

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Clause chains are sequences of clauses with under-specified verbal predicates, plus a single clause with a fully-specified verbal predicate. Clause chains represent the morpho-syntactic demarcation of a speech unit greater than a single clause, but the precise length of this unit is rarely assessed. Clause chain length, distribution, bridging linkage, and non-canonical forms are evaluated in a sample of 64 texts, containing over 1742 clause chains, in the Papuan language Nungon. In the 49 narrative texts, unlike in other genres, total clause chains per text increases as text duration increases. The average clause chain in the sample is 3–4 clauses long; the longest has 22 clauses. Average clause chain length decreases as text length increases. The longest narrative texts have similar average clause chain length, proportion of bridging clauses, and proportion of non-canonical clause chains, and feature a leisurely rhythm: half of their clause chains are minimal, two-clause chains.

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The root nominal stage: a case study of early Nungon verbs

Cited by 14 publications

References 25 publications

Ku Waru Clause Chaining and the Acquisition of Complex Syntax

Ku Waru Clause Chaining and the Acquisition of Complex Syntax

The Narrative Past Inflection in Sesotho Child and Child-Directed Speech

Quantifying clause chains in Nungon texts

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