The Dative Alternation in Norwegian Child Language
نویسندگان
چکیده
Research has shown that givenness is one of several factors that influence the choice of word order with the Dative Alternation in languages such as English. This paper investigates to what extent Norwegian children between the ages of 4;2 and 6;0 are sensitive to this factor in production. In order to test this, an experiment was carried out in which the children were prompted to produce structures involving ditransitive verbs when either the Theme or the Recipient was given. The results show that the children are sensitive to the impact of givenness, but while this is expressed through the choice of word order in Theme-given contexts (yielding the prepositional dative), it is expressed by argument omission in the Recipient-given contexts (resulting in one-argument responses with only the Theme overtly produced).
منابع مشابه
Modeling dative alternations of individual children
We address the question whether children can acquire mature use of higher-level grammatical choices from the linguistic input, given only general prior knowledge and learning biases. We do so on the basis of a case study with the dative alternation in English, building on a study by De Marneffe et al. (2012) who model the production of the dative alternation by seven young children, using data ...
متن کاملEvaluating automatic annotation: automatically detecting and enriching instances of the dative alternation
In this article, we automatically create two large and richly annotated data sets for studying the English dative alternation. With an intrinsic and an extrinsic evaluation, we address the question of whether such data sets that are obtained and enriched automatically are suitable for linguistic research, even if they contain errors. The extrinsic evaluation consists of building logistic regres...
متن کاملPredicting is not explaining: targeted learning of the dative alternation
Corpus linguists dig into large-scale collections of texts to better understand the rules governing a given language. We advocate for ambitious corpus linguistics drawing inspiration from the latest developments of semiparametrics for a modern targeted learning. Transgressing discipline-specific borders, we adapt an approach that has proven successful in biostatistics and apply it to the well-t...
متن کاملEarly syntactic productivity : Evidence from dative shift q
The abstractness of children’s early syntactic representations has been questioned in the recent acquisition literature. While some research has suggested that children’s knowledge of basic constructions such as the transitive is robust and abstract at a very young age, other work has proposed that young children only have constructions that are specific to individual lexical items. The present...
متن کاملOn the Syntax of Ditransitive Constructions
This paper deals with modelling the argument structure of constructions with two internal arguments expressing a beneficiary/recipient and a patient/theme. It offers an analysis of the dative shift which captures both the alternative grammatical function mappings and the altered semantics of the participants of the related predicates. The LMT variant used assumes that semantic participants are ...
متن کامل