Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T23:19:29.369Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Early passive acquisition in Inuktitut*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Shanley E. M. Allen  and
Martha B. Crago
Shanley E. M. Allen*
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik
Martha B. Crago
Affiliation:
McGill University
*
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Postbus 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Passive structures are typically assumed to be one of the later acquired constructions in child language. English-speaking children have been shown to produce and comprehend their first simple passive structures productively by about age four and to master more complex structures by about age nine. Recent crosslinguistic data have shown that this pattern may not hold across languages of varying structures. This paper presents data from four Inuit children aged 2;0 to 3;6 that shows relatively early acquisition of both simple and complex forms of the passive. Within this age range children are productively producing truncated, full, action and experiential passives. Some possible reasons for this precociousness are explored including adult input and language structure.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , February 1996 , pp. 129 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This article is based on a portion of a doctoral thesis submitted by the first author to the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. The research was supported by funding from the following agencies: Kativik School Board Research Council, Northern Scientific Training Program, McGill University Department of Native and Northern Education, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies, and Fonds pour la formation de chercheurs et I'aide à la recherche. We are grateful to Mark Baker, Katherine Demuth, Michael Fortescue, Mick Mallon, Keith Nelson, Lizzie Ningiuruvik, Johnny Nowra, Clifton Pye, Matthew Rispoli, Tom Roeper, Lydia White, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this article. We also thank the children and families involved in this study and the many Inuit involved in transcribing and analysing the data.

References

REFERENCES

Allen, S. E. M. (1994). Acquisition of some mechanisms of transitivity alternation in Arctic Quebec Inuktitut. Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, Montreal, QC.Google Scholar
Allen, S. E. M. (in press). Aspects of argument structure acquisition in Inuktitut. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Allen, S. E. M. & Crago, M. B. (1989). Acquisition of Noun Incorporation in Inuktitut. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 28, 49–56.Google Scholar
Allen, S. E. M. & Crago, M. B. (1993). The acquisition of passives and unaccusatives in Inuktitut. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics 9, 1–29.Google Scholar
Baker, M. (1988). Incorporation: a theory of grammatical function changing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Baker, M., Johnson, K. & Roberts, I. (1989). Passive arguments raised. Linguistic Inquiry 20, 219–52.Google Scholar
Baker, N. D. & Nelson, K. E. (1984). Recasting and related conversational techniques for triggering syntactic advances by young children. First Language 5, 3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldie, B. J. (1976). The acquisition of the passive voice. Journal of Child Language 3, 331–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1985). The acquisition of Hebrew. In Slobin, D. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. i. Hillsdate, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, J. R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Bittner, M. (1994). Case, scope, and binding. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, L. (1973). One word at a time: the use of single word utterances. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Bok-Bennema, R. (1991). Case and agreement in Inuit. Ph.D. dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Brabant, Tilburg, Netherlands.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borer, H. & Wexler, K. (1987). The maturation of syntax. In Roeper, T. & Williams, E. (eds.), Parameter setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1990). When a patient is the subject: sorting out passives, anticausatives and middles in the acquisition of English. Paper presented at Symposium on Voice, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budwig, N. (1990). The linguistic marking of nonprototypical agency: an exploration into children's use of passives. Linguistics 28, 1221–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., Thornton, R. & Murasugi, K. (1987). Capturing the evasive passive. Paper presented at the 12th Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J. G. & de Villiers, P. A. (1985). The acquisition of English. In Slobin, D. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. i. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (1989). Maturation and the acquisition of Sesotho passive. Language 65, 56–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, K. (1990). Subject, topic and Sesotho passive. Journal of Child Language 17, 67–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Demuth, K. (1992). Accessing functional categories in Sesotho: interactions at the morpho-syntactic interface. In Meisel, J. M. (ed.), The acquisition of verb placement: functional categories and V2 phenomena in language acquisition. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Di Sciullo, A. & Williams, E. (1987). On the definition of word. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Eisenbeiss, S. (1993). Auxiliaries and the acquisition of the passive in German. In Clark, E. V. (ed.), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Child Language Research Forum. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
Fortescue, M. (1984). West Greenlandic. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Fortescue, M. (1985). Learning to speak Greenlandic: a case study of a two-year-old's morphology in a polysynthetic language. First Language 5, 101–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fortescue, M. & Lennert Olsen, L. (1992). The acquisition of West Greenlandic. In Slobin, D. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. 3. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gordon, P. & Chafetz, J. (1990). Verb-based versus class-based accounts of actionality effects in children's comprehension of passives. Cognition 36, 227–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoekstra, T. & Schwartz, B. (eds). (1994). Language acquisition studies in generative grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horgan, D. (1978). The development of the full passive. Journal of Child Language 5, 65–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johns, A. (1992). Deriving ergativity. Linguistic Inquiry 23, 57–87.Google Scholar
Kalmar, I. (1979). Case and context in Inuktitut Eskimo. Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 49. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, E. L. (1985). Passive in the world's languages. In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, Vol. 1. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Klima, E. & Bellugi, U. (1966). Syntactic regularities in the speech of children. In Lyons, J. & Wales, R. J. (eds), Psycholinguistic papers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Koopman, H. & Sportiche, D. (1991). The position of subjects. Lingua 85, 211–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levin, B. & Rappaport, M. (1986). The formation of adjectival passives. Linguistic Inquiry 17, 623–61.Google Scholar
Levy, Y. (ed.). (1994). Other children, other languages. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Lovell, K. & Dixon, E. M. (1965). The growth and control of grammar in imitation, comprehension and production. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 5, 1–9.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Snow, C. (1990). The Child Language Data Exchange System: an update. Journal of Child Language 17, 457–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maratsos, M. P. (1985). Spontaneous use of the passive: some preliminary findings. Unpublished manuscript, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. P., Fox, D., Becker, J. & Chalkley, M. A. (1985). Semantic restrictions on children's passives. Cognition 19, 167–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mills, A. (1985). The acquisition of German. In Slobin, D. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Pierce, A. E. (1992). Language acquisition and syntactic theory: a comparative analysis of French and English child grammars. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., Lebeaux, D. & Frost, L. A. (1987). Productivity and constraints in the acquisition of the passive. Cognition 26, 195–267.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pye, C. & Quixtan Poz, P. (1988). Precocious passives and antipassives in Quiche Mayan. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 27, 71–80.Google Scholar
Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English syntax. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1982). Universal and particular in the acquisition of language. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. Cambridge: C. U. P.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (ed.). (1985). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (ed.). (1992). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. 3. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Smith, L. R. (1981). Passive as a two-cycle process in Inuktitut. lnuit Studies 5, 101–13.Google Scholar
Sudhalter, V. & Braine, M. D. S. (1985). How does comprehension of the passive develop? A comparison of actional and experiential verbs. Journal of Child Language 12, 455–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Suzman, S. M. (1985). Learning the passive in Zulu. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 24, 131–7.Google Scholar
Turner, E. A. & Rommetveit, R. (1968). The acquisition of sentence voice and reversibility. Child Development 38, 649–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wasow, T. (1977). Transformations and the lexicon. In Culicover, P., Wasow, T. & Akmajian, A. (eds), Formal syntax. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Weinberg, A. (1987). Comments on Borer and Wexler. In Roeper, T. & Williams, E. (eds), Parameter setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar