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Reference states and reversals: undoing actions with verbs*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Eve V. Clark ,
Kathie L. Carpenter  and
Werner Deutsch
Eve V. Clark*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Kathie L. Carpenter
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Werner Deutsch
Affiliation:
University of Braunschweig
*
Stanford University, Department of Linguistics, Stanford, CA 94305-2150, USA.
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Abstract

The purpose of these studies is to characterize children's conception of reversal and its relation to a reference state. A reversal is the move from one state to some prior state of affairs. For example, shoes that have been TIED can be UNTIED, parcels WRAPPED then UNWRAPPED, and dishes COVERED then UNCOVERED. The present studies were designed to find out how children (aged 1;0 to 5;0) describe reversals of action that restore objects to a prior, less constrained, state. In English, the prefix un- offers the most productive device for this, but, initially, children rely on a verb like open, on general purpose undo, and on particles like out and off, As they acquire un-, English-speaking children must learn that this prefix applies primarily to verbs for change-of-state, often for enclosing, covering and attaching. In German, there is no reversal prefix, but there are productive particles. German-speaking children also begin with a verb like open and then turn to verb particles on a course similar to that in English to express reversals.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , October 1995 , pp. 633 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (BNS-80 07349), The Spencer Foundation, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, NL. We thank Barbara F. Hecht, Sherry Kowtko and Inga Tarim for help in collecting the data, and Olive Gong for help with the analyses. We are grateful to the teachers and children at Bing Nursery School, Stanford; Kindergarten Sonnenblume, Kleve; Kindergarten Burg Ranzow, Materborn; Kindergarten Gretenberg, Düsseldorf, and Kindergarten Overbergstrasse, Kellen, for their invaluable collaboration. And we are indebted to Herbert H. Clark and to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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