LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

Acquisition of Passives

Mahima Gulati

MA, EFLU, Hyderabad

With a keen interest and utter amazement about how language can follow same milestones in acquisition cross linguistically, very recently I started my Master’s dissertation, in language acquisition. My interest in syntax inspired me to work on a topic with syntactic grounding and therefore I chose the acquisition of passives. However, due to the crunch of time I had to limit my study only to the acquisition of passives in Hindi.

My study therefore began with a purely syntactic underpinning, using theories of language acquisition to read into the chronology of acquisition of what Maratsos et al. (1985) called actional and non actional passives.

My research led me into perceiving that syntactically, there are two schools of thought that explain the delay in the acquisition of passives. Borer and Wexler (1987,1992), who in their study proposed an A-Chain Delay Hypothesis and gave a maturational account for the delay in the acquisition of passives. They claimed that verbal passivization includes two steps, an NP Movement of the object (of the active construction) to the Spec IP, an A-Chain formation, and assignment of the thematic role to the moved object. Borer and Wexler believe that the child is unable to link the moved object to its trace and thus not form the A-Chain. Since, this mechanism matures in the child only around the age of 5 years that is when passives are acquired.

However, Pinker, Lebeaux, and Frost(1987) collected data that suggested that English speaking children around the age of 3 years were able to spontaneously produce passive constructions, with auxiliaries like be and get and called these be passives and get passives respectively. Demuth (1989) also observed that Sesotho speaking children around the age of 2;8 years could produce passive constructions along with the by-phrase.

Thus, the second school of thought with Fox and Grodzinsky as its proponents, in 1998  proposed a Thematic-role Transmission Deficit account claiming that forming the A-Chain is not the problem, which is why children can manage the get passives but in case of be passives with the by phrase, the issue is with the latter step. The transmission of thematic role from the passive morpheme to the NP in the by phrase adds to the processing load and the child has a trouble performing this mechanism.

At this point it became essentially important for me to dwell on the semantic problems that the child could have because clearly children had difficulty in comprehending constructions when actional and non actional verbs were interspersed with reversible and irreversible. Wherein, reversible non actional constructions were the most difficult to process. This was quite robust and could not be overlooked.

Further analysis into the topic revealed that syntax does a fair enough job explaining the acquisition pattern wherein, passives with actional verbs precede the acquisition of passives with non-actional verbs. However, the issue of reversibility can only be dealt with under the purview of semantics. Thus, a syntactic semantic interface seemed really important.

The performance of a child seemed to be pulled down by the levels of processing load a sentence had to offer, both in terms of word order (agent, patient/theme reversal) and reversibility per say. These observations made more sense when I learnt that Frazer, Bellugi and Brown (1963) had conducted a study at the end of which they concluded that children are able to comprehend active voice constructions earlier than the passive voice constructions, owing to the fact that the change in the word order renders a lot of processing load as the logical subject doesn’t precede the verb. Slobin (1964) too stated that semantically the simplest sentence construction would be the one in which, actor and the acted upon cannot be interchanged. In such an instance, the child doesn’t undergo any processing load in order to figure out who the actor is and who is the one being acted upon. Schlesinger (1966) was also affirmative that actor-action-acted upon which syntactically can be understood as subject-verb-object is the easiest word order in terms of interpretation. Any other permutation or combination of the word order leads to semantic processing load.

Thus, semantically the hierarchy in terms of complexity of interpretation for a child bottom-up would be non reversible actives, followed by reversible actives which are in turn followed by non reversible passives and finally the reversible passives.

In addition to this previously established stream of thought, I have added another aspect that makes the study potentially Hindi-centric by analyzing the acquisition of inabilitative passive constructions of the ‘se + nahi (negation)’ form. And by adding the notion of actionality and reversibility to the inabilitatives has helped come up with an interesting area which has not really been experimented with. I am still working upon this part of my study however according to my hypothesis acquisition should follow the following chronology where actional irreversible inabilitatives precede the acquisition of actional reversible inabilitatives, which in turn should precede the acquisition of nonactional irreversible inabilitatives and finally the nonactional reversible inabilitatives. I do not know if the data would fall in line with the hypothesis, thus, I can’t make any conclusive remarks here.

I have also had some initial priming into morphosyntax in terms of tense, aspect and modality and am working currently with the aspect in Hindi in terms of telicity, boundedness and ergativity. Since, Roumyana Pancheva, has worked elaborately with tense and aspect, it would be of great utility to me to interact with her and build a better insight into the area.

Therefore, with my limited understanding and exposure with linguistics, syntax and semantics seem to traverse all along. One can’t therefore, deal with any one of them in isolation. It is herein that I think that LISSIM 6 would help me grow. I have been exposed to some bit of syntax over a year but the journey through the semantic interface has only started. I would like to explore other possible options wherein syntactic-semantic interface can be exploited. It would then particularly interest me to put the theoretical basis into the applied sphere. That is I would like to use this knowledge to analyze language acquisition because I do believe that semantics to some extent bootstraps syntax.

 

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