The acquisition of ergative languages
Issue Date
1990-01-05Author
Pye, Clifton
Publisher
De Gruyter Open
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Ergative languages have challenged the ingenuity of linguists for more
than a century. This article explores learnability problems associated with
the acquisition of ergative languages. Traditionally, an ergative language
is one which treats the subjects of intransitive verbs in the same way as
the objects of transitive verbs. Languages may have rules which operate
on a morphologically or syntactically ergative basis, but all languages are
syntactically accusative to some extent. Both types of ergativity raise
problems for language-acquisition theory. Children acquiring ergative
morphologies must learn to distinguish between the subjects of transitive
and intransitive verbs. Acquisition data suggest that children acquire
ergative and accusative morphological systems equally easily. This finding
supports a distributional learning procedure. Learnability considerations
rule out the existence of syntactically ergative languages in the sense of
Marantzs (1984) ergativity hypothesis. Unambiguous evidence of syntactic
ergativity only appears in complex sentences; thus, children cannot use
data within simple, active sentences to establish whether or not their
language is syntactically ergative. Children acquiring languages with ergative
syntactic constructions must learn when the direct object of a transitive
verb functions as a syntactic pivot. Acquisition data for ergative syntactic
constructions in K'iche' and Kaluli suggest that children initially fail to
recognize ergative constraints on syntactic rules. This finding supports
semantic bootstrapping as an acquisition mechanism for the initial construction
of syntactic structure.
Description
This is the published version, also available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling.1990.28.6.1291.
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Citation
Pye, Clifton. "The acquisition of ergative languages." Linguistics. (1990) Vol. 28, 6. pp. 1291-1330. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling.1990.28.6.1291.
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