Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20366999 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anat Ninio (0000-0001-6797-5687, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 619-653 |
| Publication date | 1999-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Child Language (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-0009 • E-ISSN: 1469-7602 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0305000999003931 |
| PMID | 10603698 |
| OpenAlex | W1970751875 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 74 |
The first verbs to participate in VO and SVO combinations, and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinatory patterns over different verbs were investigated. The longitudinal language observations of 16 children, one acquiring English, the others Hebrew, were examined. The children were observed once a week for 3–12 months, the observations starting when the children were still in the single-word stage (1;1–2;1) and ending when they were well into multiword speech (1;8–2;7). The results indicate that the more verbs children already know to combine in a certain pattern, the faster they learn new ones. Apparently children induce from individual word-combinations some general principles that facilitate further learning. The ‘pathbreaking verbs’ that begin the acquisition of a novel syntactic rule tend to be generic verbs expressing the relevant combinatorial property in a relatively pure fashion: the same verbs that children first combine with direct objects, are typical grammaticalized markers of transitivity in many languages. These verbs do not have HIGH TRANSITIVITY as defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980). Rather, they express fundamental ‘object relations’ of incorporation into, and ejection from the personal. Crosslinguistic evidence indicates that this may be the basic transitivity construct in languages. The results raise the possibility that lexical-specific learning of positional patterns is sufficient to account for the formation of syntactic abstractions
Language acquisition · Language development · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Transitive relation · Word order · Computer Science · Language Development and Disorders · Mathematics · Multilingual Education and Policy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence
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| Unique citing works | 74 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2.74 |
| Citation span | 1999 - 2026 (28) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 62 |