An adversity passive analysis of early Sesotho passives: Reanalyzing a counterexample to Maturation

One of the goals of language acquisition research is to discover what linguistic abilities children bring to the language learning process. In their Maturation Hypothesis, Borer and Wexler (henceforth B&W 1987) suggest delayed production of verbal passives and other A-movement constructions in child English and child Hebrew is an indication that grammar is not fully mature at birth and that over time it matures to become adult-like. As they believe it to be a biological deficiency, B&W claim the passive-like constructions children employ before the age where this ability matures (around 4;0) will not be verbal passives, but other constructions that do not have A-movement, such as lexical adjectival passives in English. More generally, children will produce passive-like constructions at an early age only if the language has a syntactic homophone (s-homophone), a construction homophonous with verbal passives, but without A-movement syntax (Babyonyshev et al 2001). Experimental results such as those found in Babyonyshev et al (2001) show that when no s-homophones are available for A-movement constructions in the language, children perform poorly on elicitation tasks. While crosslinguistic acquisition studies showing delayed have supported the Maturation Hypothesis (Japanese, Sugisaki 1998; Spanish, Pierce 1992), other crosslinguistic studies have shown the opposite case. One such counterexample comes from the study of the Bantu language Sesotho (Demuth 1989, 1990, 1992). This acquisition study of spontaneous production data suggests Sesotho-speaking children may acquire the passive as early as 2;8. To provide support for this claim, Demuth shows verbal passives in Sesotho have no s-homophones with adjectival passives, and that children productively alternate between active and passive forms of the verbs. Recent studies, however, have shown that although Sesotho verbal passives may contain A-chains, the evidence for productive passives in Sesotho is not particularly strong (Crawford 2004). As the evidence is not strong and there is no experimental data to corroborate the findings in the spontaneous production data, it is possible Demuth may have had too narrow a view of what can be considered an s-homophone in this language. This paper explores the suggestion (Wexler 1999, Babyonyshev et al 2001) that early Sesotho passives are similar to Japanese adversity passives, a construction which Japanese-speaking children acquire early (Sugisaki 1998). The idea that early Sesotho passives are adversity/malefactive constructions and can be acquired early is supported by the literature; early passives in other Bantu languages express situations where the patient is negatively affected (e.g. Zulu; Suzman …