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Answers without questions: The emergence of fragments in child language1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2009

JONATHAN GINZBURG  and
DIMITRA KOLLIAKOU
JONATHAN GINZBURG*
Affiliation:
King's College, London
*
Authors' addresses: (Ginzburg) Department of Computer Science, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

Non-sentential utterances (NSUs), utterances that lack an overt verbal (more generally predicative) constituent, are common in adult speech. This paper presents the results of a corpus study of the emergence of certain classes of NSUs in child language, based primarily on data from the Manchester Corpus from CHILDES. Our principal finding is the late short query effect: the main classes of non-sentential queries (NSQs) are acquired much later than non-sentential answers (NSAs). At a stage when the child has productive use of sentential queries, and has mastered elliptical declaratives and the polar lexemes ‘yes’ and ‘no’, non-sentential questions are virtually absent. This happens despite the fact that such questions are common in the speech of the child's caregivers and that the contexts are ones which should facilitate the production of such NSUs. We argue that these results are intrinsically problematic for analyses of NSUs in terms of a single, generalized mechanism of phonological reduction, as standard in generative grammar. We show how to model this effect within an approach of dialogue-oriented constructionism, wherein NSUs are grammatical words or constructions whose main predicate is a contextual parameter resolved in a manner akin to indexical terms, the relevant aspect of context being the discourse topic. We sketch an explanation for the order of acquisition of NSUs, based on a notion which combines accessibility of contextual parameters and complexity of content construction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , November 2009 , pp. 641 - 673
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

[1]

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2002 LAGB meeting in Manchester, at the 2003 Georgetown Roundtable in Washington and at CLRF'04 at Stanford, and at seminars in Durham, Essex, and Edinburgh. We wish to thank audiences there for many useful comments and others who have discussed issues related to the paper, in particular Bob Borsley, Penelope Brown, Harald Clahsen, Eve Clark, Robin Cooper, Raquel Fernández, Pat Healey, Ruth Kempson, Shalom Lappin, Elena Lieven, and David Schlangen. This work has been supported by grant number RES-000-23-0065 from the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, by a Research Leave Grant AH/E50440X from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, and by the EU project Dealing with Uncertainty in Dialogue (DEAWU). Many thanks to Raquel Fernández and David Schlangen for corpus processing software and other computational assistance and to Marina Kolokode for help with an initial pilot study. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Linguistics for many useful suggestions, and Ewa Jaworska and an external copy-editor for the Journal of Linguistics for their assiduous reading of the manuscript. Thanks also to Ewa for her help and patience in getting the paper to press.

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