A Discourse-Pragmatic Analysis of Child Null Arguments in an Obligatory-Argument Language

在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，Shanley Allen博士将进行为期两年的研究，调查讲英语的儿童对语用学的敏感性在多大程度上可以解释他们不像成年人那样省略语法主语和宾语（即口头争论）。许多因素，如话语中的给定与新的，语境中的存在与缺席，已经被证明会影响成人的论点实现，也会影响儿童学习允许论点省略的语言（例如韩语、意大利语、因纽特爱斯基摩语）。本研究将分析现有的英语和因纽特语儿童（2-4岁）的录像数据库中的自发言语，以回答以下问题：(1)强制性论证语言（英语）中省略的论点是否可以用儿童对话语语用因素的（过度）敏感来解释？(2)儿童对语篇语用因素的敏感性是否随发展时间而变化？(3)儿童在强制性论证（英语）和选择性论证（因纽特语）语言中对语篇语用因素的敏感程度是否相同？(4)语篇语用学对论证省略的解释在多大程度上与当前流行的语法解释一致或相反？这项研究将有助于确定语篇语用学在理解和解释儿童如何学习词法和句法方面的重要性，直到最近，研究人员在很大程度上忽视了语篇语用学的影响。对语言学习的语篇语用和语法解释进行明确的比较，将有助于我们更好地理解理论和数据之间的关系，以及相互竞争的理论之间的关键差异和偶然差异。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Shanley Allen will conduct two years of research investigating the extent to which English-speaking children's non-adult-like omission of grammatical subjects and objects (i.e. verbal arguments) can be accounted for by their sensitivity to discourse pragmatics. A number of factors, such as given vs. new in discourse and presence vs. absence in context, have been shown to influence argument realization for adults, and also for children learning languages in which argument omission is allowed (e.g. Korean, Italian, Inuktitut Eskimo). The present study will analyze spontaneous speech in existing videotaped databases from English-speaking and Inuktitut-speaking children, aged 2-4 years of age, in order to answer the following questions: (1) Can omitted arguments in an obligatory-argument language (English) be explained by children's (over-)sensitivity to discourse pragmatic factors? (2) Does children's sensitivity to discourse pragmatic factors change over developmental time? (3) Are children sensitive to discourse pragmatic factors in the same way in obligatory-argument (English) and optional-argument (Inuktitut) languages? (4) To what extent does the discourse pragmatic account of argument omission coincide or contrast with the currently prevailing grammatical accounts?This research will help to identify the importance of discourse pragmatics in understanding and explaining how children learn morphology and syntax, a domain where until recently researchers have largely discounted the influence of discourse pragmatics. The explicit comparison between discourse pragmatic and grammatical accounts of language learning will help advance our understanding of the relationship between theory and data, and of what the crucial vs. incidental differences are between competing theories.