Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity
Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity
复制标题
句法发展中的开创性动词和原型及物性问题
作者：
A. Ninio
考察了最早参与VO和SVO组合的动词，以及这些组合模式在不同动词上传播的时间参数。对16名儿童进行了纵向语言观察，其中一名儿童学习英语，另一名儿童学习希伯来语。每周观察一次，持续3-12个月，观察从儿童还处于单词阶段(1；1-2；1)开始，到他们很好地进入多词阶段(1；8-2；7)结束。结果表明，孩子们已经知道以某种模式组合的动词越多，他们学习新单词的速度就越快。显然，孩子们从个别的单词组合中归纳出一些有助于进一步学习的一般原则。开始习得一种新的句法规则的“开创性动词”往往是以一种相对纯粹的方式表达相关组合属性的类属动词：在许多语言中，儿童最初与直接宾语组合的动词是典型的及物性语法化标记。这些动词并不具有Hopper&Thompson(1980)所定义的高度及物性。相反，它们表达了与个人的结合和排斥的基本‘客体关系’。跨语言证据表明，这可能是语言中基本的及物性结构。这一结果提出了位置模式的词汇特异性学习足以解释句法抽象形成的可能性。
The first verbs to participate in VO and SVO combinations, and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinatory patterns over different verbs were investigated. The longitudinal language observations of 16 children, one acquiring English, the others Hebrew, were examined. The children were observed once a week for 3–12 months, the observations starting when the children were still in the single-word stage (1;1–2;1) and ending when they were well into multiword speech (1;8–2;7). The results indicate that the more verbs children already know to combine in a certain pattern, the faster they learn new ones. Apparently children induce from individual word-combinations some general principles that facilitate further learning. The ‘pathbreaking verbs’ that begin the acquisition of a novel syntactic rule tend to be generic verbs expressing the relevant combinatorial property in a relatively pure fashion: the same verbs that children first combine with direct objects, are typical grammaticalized markers of transitivity in many languages. These verbs do not have HIGH TRANSITIVITY as defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980). Rather, they express fundamental ‘object relations’ of incorporation into, and ejection from the personal. Crosslinguistic evidence indicates that this may be the basic transitivity construct in languages. The results raise the possibility that lexical-specific learning of positional patterns is sufficient to account for the formation of syntactic abstractions.