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The ontogeny of complex verb phrases

How children learn to negotiate fact and desire
  • T. Givón
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Syntactic Complexity
This chapter is in the book Syntactic Complexity

Abstract

This paper investigate the acquisition of V-complement constructions (complex VPs) by English-speaking children ca. age 1;8-to-2;9. It suggests that the child acquires these constructions during intensive epistemic or deontic modal negotiations with the adult. In the earliest stage, the main-plus-complement construction is spread over adjacent child-adult or adult-child conversational turns ( Ochs et al. 1979). The early precursor of the complex VP construction is thus paratactic, with the two clauses falling under separate intonation contours. Only later on is the construction condensed into a complex syntactic construction under a single intonation contour, produced by the child alone. The early use of these constructions is as direct speech acts, be they epistemic or deontic (Diessel 2005), whereby the semantic focus resides in the complement clause, and the main clause acts as a modal operator. But this is true of both the children and their adult interlocutors, and is also characteristic, at the text-frequency level, of adult oral language (Thomson 2001). However, this characterization of complex VPs is semantic rather than syntactic.

Abstract

This paper investigate the acquisition of V-complement constructions (complex VPs) by English-speaking children ca. age 1;8-to-2;9. It suggests that the child acquires these constructions during intensive epistemic or deontic modal negotiations with the adult. In the earliest stage, the main-plus-complement construction is spread over adjacent child-adult or adult-child conversational turns ( Ochs et al. 1979). The early precursor of the complex VP construction is thus paratactic, with the two clauses falling under separate intonation contours. Only later on is the construction condensed into a complex syntactic construction under a single intonation contour, produced by the child alone. The early use of these constructions is as direct speech acts, be they epistemic or deontic (Diessel 2005), whereby the semantic focus resides in the complement clause, and the main clause acts as a modal operator. But this is true of both the children and their adult interlocutors, and is also characteristic, at the text-frequency level, of adult oral language (Thomson 2001). However, this characterization of complex VPs is semantic rather than syntactic.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part I. Diachrony
  5. From nominal to clausal morphosyntax 23
  6. Re(e)volving complexity 53
  7. Multiple routes to clause union 81
  8. On the origins of serial verb constructions in Kalam 119
  9. A quantitative approach to the development of complex predicates 145
  10. Elements of complex structures, where recursion isn’t 163
  11. Nominalization and the origin of subordination 199
  12. The co-evolution of syntactic and pragmatic complexity 215
  13. Two pathways of grammatical evolution 239
  14. Part II. Child language
  15. On the role of frequency and similarity in the acquisition of subject and non-subject relative clauses 251
  16. ‘ Starting small ’ effects in the acquisition of early relative constructions in Spanish 277
  17. The ontogeny of complex verb phrases 311
  18. Part III. Cognition and neurology
  19. Syntactic complexity versus concatenation in a verbal production task 391
  20. The emergence of linguistic complexity 405
  21. Cognitive and neural underpinnings of syntactic complexity 433
  22. Neural mechanisms of recursive processing in cognitive and linguistic complexity 461
  23. Syntactic complexity in the brain 491
  24. Part IV. Biology and evolution
  25. Neural plasticity 509
  26. Recursion 531
  27. Index 545
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.85.13the

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part I. Diachrony
  5. From nominal to clausal morphosyntax 23
  6. Re(e)volving complexity 53
  7. Multiple routes to clause union 81
  8. On the origins of serial verb constructions in Kalam 119
  9. A quantitative approach to the development of complex predicates 145
  10. Elements of complex structures, where recursion isn’t 163
  11. Nominalization and the origin of subordination 199
  12. The co-evolution of syntactic and pragmatic complexity 215
  13. Two pathways of grammatical evolution 239
  14. Part II. Child language
  15. On the role of frequency and similarity in the acquisition of subject and non-subject relative clauses 251
  16. ‘ Starting small ’ effects in the acquisition of early relative constructions in Spanish 277
  17. The ontogeny of complex verb phrases 311
  18. Part III. Cognition and neurology
  19. Syntactic complexity versus concatenation in a verbal production task 391
  20. The emergence of linguistic complexity 405
  21. Cognitive and neural underpinnings of syntactic complexity 433
  22. Neural mechanisms of recursive processing in cognitive and linguistic complexity 461
  23. Syntactic complexity in the brain 491
  24. Part IV. Biology and evolution
  25. Neural plasticity 509
  26. Recursion 531
  27. Index 545
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