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  • Children's acquisition of Warlpiri: comprehension of transitive sentences*

  • Edith L. Bavin, Timothy A. Shopen
  • Journal: Journal of Child Language / Volume 12 / Issue 3 / October 1985
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2008, pp. 597-610

  • Comprehension test results from children acquiring Warlpiri as a first language in the Yuendumu community indicate that the canonical transitive sentence is one with an ergative-absolutive verb. We hypoth- esize that the acquisition process is influenced by a number of properties of the language, properties including the presence of homophonous forms for some of the case endings, the use of three different case frames, the optional ellipsis of core arguments, and the optionality of case markings in certain conditions.

Language Typology and Syntactic Description
  • Volume 1, Clause Structure, 2nd edition
  • Edited by Timothy Shopen
  • Published online: 16 January 2010
  • Print publication: 04 October 2007
  • This unique three-volume survey brings together a team of leading scholars to explore the syntactic and morphological structures of the world's languages. Clearly organized and broad-ranging, it covers topics such as parts-of-speech, passives, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, inflectional morphology, tense, aspect, mood, and diexis. The contributors look at the major ways that these notions are realized, and provide informative sketches of them at work in a range of languages. Each volume is accessibly written and clearly explains each new concept introduced. Although the volumes can be read independently, together they provide an indispensable reference work for all linguists and fieldworkers interested in cross-linguistic generalizations. Volume I covers parts-of-speech systems, word order, the noun phrase, clause types, speech act distinctions, the passive, and information packaging in the clause.

  • 1 - Parts-of-speech systems

  • Edited by Timothy Shopen
  • Book: Language Typology and Syntactic Description
  • Published online: 16 January 2010
  • Print publication: 04 October 2007, pp 1-60

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Parts of speech is the traditional term for the major classes of words that are grammatically distinguished in a language. While all languages make parts-of-speech distinctions, there are rather striking differences between languages with regard to both the kind and the number of such distinctions that they make. A field worker investigating an unfamiliar language may therefore find it useful to know what generalizations can be made about parts-of-speech systems. What, for example, can be said about the ways in which, and the limits within which, parts-of-speech inventories may differ from one another? Which parts-of-speech distinctions are universal and which language-specific? What are the ways in which languages that lack a particular part of speech express the semantic equivalent? And what relations are there between the parts-of-speech system of a language and the language's other typological characteristics? It is the aim of this chapter to provide some answers to such questions.

    By way of orientation, the present section sets forth some general assumptions that underlie the presentation in the rest of the chapter. First, then, it is assumed here that the primary criteria for parts-of-speech classification are grammatical, not semantic. As has been amply demonstrated in the linguistic literature (see, for example, Fries (1952)), the familiar notional parts-of-speech definitions, such as ‘a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing’, fail to provide an adequate basis for parts-of-speech classification, since there are many cases in which their applicability or inapplicability is unclear. Grammatical criteria, on the other hand, are not open to this objection.

Language Typology and Syntactic Description
  • Volume 3, Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, 2nd edition
  • Edited by Timothy Shopen
  • Published online: 29 December 2009
  • Print publication: 04 October 2007
  • This three-volume survey brings together a team of leading scholars to explore the syntactic and morphological structures of the world's languages. Clearly organized and broad-ranging, it covers topics such as parts-of-speech, passives, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, inflectional morphology, tense, aspect, mood, and diexis. The contributors look at the major ways that these notions are realized, and provide informative sketches of them at work in a range of languages. Each volume is accessibly written and clearly explains each concept introduced. Although the volumes can be read independently, together they provide an indispensable reference work for all linguists and fieldworkers interested in cross-linguistic generalizations. Most of the chapters in the second edition are substantially revised - some on topics not covered by the first edition. Volume III covers typological distinctions in word formation, lexical typologies, inflectional morphology, gender and noun classes, aspect, tense, mood, and lexical nominalization.

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