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Splitting the notion of ‘agent’: case-marking in early child Hindi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2005

BHUVANA NARASIMHAN
BHUVANA NARASIMHAN
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
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Abstract

Two construals of agency are evaluated as possible innate biases guiding case-marking in children. A BROAD construal treats agentive arguments of multi-participant and single-participant events as being similar. A NARROWER construal is restricted to agents of multi-participant events. In Hindi, ergative case-marking is associated with agentive participants of multi-participant, perfective actions. Children relying on a broad or narrow construal of agent are predicted to overextend ergative case-marking to agentive participants of transitive imperfective actions and/or intransitive actions. Longitudinal data from three children acquiring Hindi (1;7 to 3;9) reveal no overextension errors, suggesting early sensitivity to distributional patterns in the input.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , November 2005 , pp. 787 - 803
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The data reported here were collected with funding from the Max Planck Institute, and in collaboration with Rachna Sinha, Pritha Chandra, Ayesha Kidwai, Rukmini Bhaya-Nair, Bhumika Sharma, Rajesh Kumar, Sheeba Mathen, and Kavita Joshi, among others, without whose efforts this research would not be possible. I am also grateful to a number of people who provided feedback on different occasions: the audiences at the 2004 Linguistic Society of America conference, 2003 Boston University Language Development conference and the 2002 Max Planck Institute staff meeting, Juergen Bohnemeyer, Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown, Nancy Budwig, Miriam Butt, Sonja Eisenbeiss, Nick Enfield, James Gair, Helen de Hoop, Peter Indefrey, Peter Jordens, Wolfgang Klein, John Lucy, Catherine O'Connor, Cliff Pye, Smita Srivastava and the anonymous reviewers of this paper. The views expressed here and any remaining errors are solely mine.