Volume 38, Issue 3

The papers in this issue discuss children's ellipsis of arguments, focusing on the interaction of discourse (or usage) with grammar and typology. Over the past years, many of the discussions on argument ellipsis in children's language were motivated by theoretical claims about universal grammar, and much of the discussion focused on subject ellipsis in an examination of the so-called pro-drop parameter. Research on the pro-drop parameter considered the implications of language differences on the acquisition process. Languages considered included Italian, Portugese, French, Chinese, English, and German (e.g. Hyams 1986; Pierce 1992; Valian 1991; Valian and Eisenberg 1996; Huang 1989). The research focused on empirical support for the initial setting of the parameter, or the factors that influenced the setting of the parameter appropriately.

This paper concerns subject and object ellipsis in Hebrew child language from two perspectives: the conditions that govern subject versus object ellipsis and the distinction between early and late omissions. We propose that in Hebrew child language (and possibly in early child language in general), subject ellipsis is initially motivated mainly by pragmatic factors, which are subsequently supplemented by morphosyntactic rules of the grammar. Object ellipsis, in contrast, is motivated only by pragmatic or semantic factors, not grammatically. It is a robust phenomenon, but far less widespread than subject ellipsis in both child and adult Hebrew. To demonstrate these claims, longitudinal data are analyzed for four Hebrew-speaking children between the ages 1;5 and 2;4, from their first word combinations to partial command of simple clause structure, supplemented by less systematic data from four other children. The analysis focuses on simple clause structure as the stage when verb argument structure (VAS) first emerges. Also, this period in children's language development allows for comparison with other studies on acquisition of null subjects and of VAS.

This paper assesses discourse pragmatics as a potential explanation for the production and omission of arguments in early child language. It employs a set of features that characterize typical situations of informativeness (Greenfield and Smith 1976; Clancy 1993, 1997) to examine argument status in data from four children aged 2;0 through 3;6 learning Inuktitut as a first language. Results based on logistic regression analyses suggest that a discourse-pragmatics account of argument representation has good explanatory adequacy, and that several of the features characterizing informativeness are good indicators of those arguments that tend to be overtly produced rather than omitted in early child language.

The present study explores two domains in Scandinavian child language development where the encoding of arguments to verbs shows a variable distribution. The first domain is grammatical subjects in an early phase of development when the 90% criterion is not yet attained. The second domain is spatial arguments (landmarks and location). It is argued that the encoding of subjects as well as of spatial arguments represents multiple constraint-satisfaction processes (encompassing both grammatical constraints and pragmatic constraints) and that the mastery of these constraints is a long-term achievement rather than something that happens suddenly in the course of acquisition. Many previous studies have focused on missing arguments, especially missing subjects, and asked what mechanisms make possible argument ellipsis. In contrast, our focus is on arguments that are actually present and on why children bother to encode arguments to begin with. In particular, we argue that input factors and pragmatic factors form an important part of the explanation for the structure of the earliest phases of the acquisition of verb arguments, irrespective of whether the arguments are traditionally considered obligatory or optional from the point of view of the target grammar.

It is generally assumed that the nature of the input children hear, when combined with innate capacities for (language) learning, is sufficiently rich for language acquisition to succeed despite the presence of ungrammatical utterances. Little attention, however, has been given to how children learn grammatical constructions that are rare in the input, where both overt positive evidence and implicit negative evidence are limited. Such cases provide a unique window of opportunity for exploring the various language-learning strategies children use, whether these exhibit certain “innate” semantic or syntactic predispositions, or whether more general learning mechanisms, such as statistical inference, are involved. This paper examines children's acquisition of double-object applicative constructions in the Bantu language Sesotho, where evidence for the order of postverbal objects is absent from the input, due in part to the high instance of “unspecified object deletion,” or object ellipsis. It finds that although three- to four-year-olds perform above chance on forced-choice elicited-production tasks, eight-year-olds are still not adult-like in their use of the syntactic restrictions that govern these constructions. The paper raises questions regarding the types of learning strategies children use under conditions of ellipsis, and the implications this has for theories of language acquisition.

The paper reports on developmental aspects of the ellipsis of core lexical arguments in Warlpiri children's narratives. The children, aged from four to ten years, each told a frog story based on Mayer's Frog, Where Are You? (1969). Stories from six adults were used for comparison. Warlpiri allows ellipsis of lexical subject and object and employs bound pronominals (clitics) to register the number and person of subject and object, although third person forms are zero. Analysis of the stories showed a high percentage of null arguments in the youngest children's stories. The lowest percentage of null lexical arguments was from the seven to eight-year-olds. The older children showed greater flexibility in the ellipsis or overt expression of lexical arguments. Overall, the stories showed no bias toward ellipsis of subject or object; for two-argument verbs, subject and object are equally likely to be null, but more subjects were null in same-subject contexts than in switch-subject contexts. No differences were noted with patterns of lexical ellipsis in sentences with overt or zero bound pronominals. The findings are discussed in relation to Karmiloff-Smith's arguments for a three-phase developmental pattern in narrative organization.

The informational adequacy of children's referential expressions in narrative texts has received considerable attention in the literature (Warden 1976, 1981; Karmiloff–Smith 1981, 1986; Hickmann 1987, 1991; Bamberg 1987; Wigglesworth 1990, 1997; Kail and Hickmann 1992; Berman and Slobin 1994; Hickmann et al. 1995; Van der Lely 1997). Much of this research has concentrated on the referential appropriateness of form of the noun phrase (definite or indefinite). While various factors have been proposed to explain children's gradual mastery of referential adequacy, this particular study focuses on how development in productive syntax influences referential cohesion. Two particular narrative discourse contexts in which definite reference is required are examined: maintaining a subject referent across clauses and reactivating an already-introduced subject referent. It is shown that the inventory of potential grammatical structures increases with development. Particular emphasis is given to subject pronoun ellipsis and to nonfinite subordination, two grammatical means of establishing cohesion across clauses. The results show that both subject ellipsis and nonfinite subordination as cohesive referential expressions increase with age. Two different sources of development change in production are explored: formal complexity of the form and appropriateness of that form in a given context.

September 20–23, Leiden, The Netherlands: 6th annual conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP-2000). The aim of the conference is to bring together psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie any aspect of human language processing. Registration and accommodation details will soon appear on the AMLaP-2000 website: www.fsw.leidenuniv.nl/www/w3_func/amlap There will be a discount for early registration, for which the deadline is 15 August 2000. For further details, get in touch with the AMLaP-2000 Committee: Gerard Kempen and Nomi Olsthoorn, AMLaP@fsw.leidenuniv.nl