Dative constructions and givenness in the speech of four-year-olds
Abstract
Previous research has shown that givenness influences adults’ syntactic choices with alternating dative verbs like give. For example, adults show a preference for given-before-new ordering with the two postverbal arguments of dative verbs. This paper considers whether givenness similarly affects child datives. In two elicited production studies with four-year-olds and a control study with adults, the discourse that participants heard before producing a dative construction was systematically varied. These studies indicate that (i) like adults, preschoolers tend to produce given-before-new argument ordering, (ii) givenness does not affect all verbs and arguments equally, and (iii) the givenness effect on word order can be largely, but not fully, attributed to the influence of givenness on referring expressions. In other words, participants showed a strong tendency to pronominalize given information and to mention pronouns first (short-before-long). These findings point to a high degree of continuity between child and adult language. Like adults, children attend to and integrate cues from form, function, and discourse as they process language for production.
©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Dative constructions and givenness in the speech of four-year-olds
- Conversational implicatures, reference point constructions, and that noun thing
- Four types of evidentiality in the native languages of Brazil
- Prosodic parallelism explaining morphophonological variation in German
- Doubling up: Two upper bounds for scalars
- Historical development of labile verbs in modern Russian
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Dative constructions and givenness in the speech of four-year-olds
- Conversational implicatures, reference point constructions, and that noun thing
- Four types of evidentiality in the native languages of Brazil
- Prosodic parallelism explaining morphophonological variation in German
- Doubling up: Two upper bounds for scalars
- Historical development of labile verbs in modern Russian
