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Discourse and the acquisition of eat*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Matthew Rispoli
Matthew Rispoli*
Affiliation:
Northern Arizona University
*
Department of English, Northern Arizona University, PO Box 6032, Flagstaff, AZ 86011–6032, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

English has several classes of transitive verbs which can optionally appear without an undergoer. Despite their similar syntactic sub-categorization, there are at least three different semantic subclasses that allow undergoer omission. Information sources based on surface structure, for example, syntactic bootstrapping, cannot inform the child of the semantic representation of these verbs. The focus of this paper is the acquisition of a single English verb, eat. The transcripts of 40 children, who were audiotaped monthly from 1;0 to 3;0, showed that eat was the first member of this verb class to be acquired. Some 1276 eat sentences were analysed for the presence of overt undergoer arguments across levels of cumulative verb lexicon (CVL) size, and two discourse conditions: (1) UNDERGOER ACCESSIBLE and (2) OPEN (to undergoer omission). Results indicate that undergoer omission became associated with discourse conditions when CVL size rose above 75 types, at MLU approximately 2·4 and age approximately 2;3. This suggests that two-year-old children are sensitive to a relationship between undergoer omission and discourse context.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , October 1992 , pp. 581 - 595
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a grant (HD 03144) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Bureau of Child Research and the Department of Human Development of the University of Kansas. The author would like to thank Pamela Hadley, Charles Fillmore, Betty Hart, Robert Van Valin and an anonymous reviewer for comments and criticism. The author also thanks Maxine Prueitt of the Juniper Gardens Language Project for help in processing the data.

References

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