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Competition, Copying and Cues: The Acquisition of Wh -questions in English and Norwegian

Competition, Copying and Cues: The Acquisition of Wh -questions in English and Norwegian. Marit Westergaard Department of Language & Linguistics/CASTL. 1. Introduction. (1) Dad: Where’s Mommy? Child: She goed to the store. Dad: Mommy goed to the store?

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Competition, Copying and Cues: The Acquisition of Wh -questions in English and Norwegian

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  1. Competition, Copying and Cues: The Acquisition of Wh-questions in English and Norwegian Marit Westergaard Department of Language & Linguistics/CASTL

  2. 1. Introduction • (1) Dad: Where’s Mommy? • Child: She goed to the store. • Dad: Mommy goed to the store? • Child: NO! (annoyed) Daddy, I say it that way, not you! • (Pinker 1999: 199)

  3. Optionality in the child grammar • Wh-questions in English: • Why hecan’t hit? (Adam 3;4.01) • What amI saying? (Adam 3;4.01) • Optionality in the input • Wh-questions in Norwegian (Tromsø): • (4) Ka sirdu? / Ka dusir? • what say you / what you say • ‘What are you saying?’

  4. 2. The Structure of the Target Languages • English: Subject-auxiliary inversion • (5) Peterwill eat the olives. • What willPeter eat? • No inversion in embedded questions/declaratives: • (6) I don’t know [*what willPeter eat] • (7) *Then willPeter eat. • No inversion w/lexical verbs, except be: (8) *What atePeter? / (9) Where wasPeter? • Residual Verb Second (V2)(Rizzi 1996)

  5. Norwegian: ‘Classical’ V2 • Dialects: No strict V2 in wh-questions (e.g. Vangsnes 2006). • (10) kor ermitt fly? (INV, file Ole.17) V2:[be+DP] • where is my plane • ‘Where is my plane? • (11) kor vi lande henne? (INV, file Ole.17)Non-V2:[pron+V] where we land LOC • ‘Where do we land?’ • V2: subject is discourse new (Westergaard 2003) • Non-V2: subject is discourse given

  6. Long (phrasal) wh-elements require V2: • (12) Korfor kommerdu? /*Korfor dukommer? • why come you • ‘Why are you coming?’ • Embedded questions require non-V2 (like English) • Subject questions require non-V2: • (13) Kem som kommer? /*Kemkommer? • who SOM come • ‘Who is coming?’

  7. Word order variation in wh-questions in adult grammars dependent on: • clause type (question vs. decl., main vs. embedded) • wh-element (short vs. long, subject vs. non-subject) • verb (lexical verbs vs. aux and/or be) • subject (given vs. new) • => quite a bit of detail must be learned from input.

  8. 3. Competition, Copying or Cues • Generative grammar (Competition) • Children endowed with a Universal Grammar (UG) containing major word order parameters, e.g. +/-V2. • Children only need to be exposed to a few examples to set the parameter and generalize to all cases(e.g. Wexler 1999). • Children’s mistakes due to competing parameter settings.

  9. Constructivist accounts (Copying) • No UG - children learn from input only. • Early grammar has no categories (N or V) or rules (e.g. S-aux inversion/V2). • Children sensitive to frequent word combinations in the input, e.g. wh-word+aux. • (2’) Why hecan’t hit? (Adam 3;4.01) [why+can’t] • (3’) What amI saying? (Adam 3;4.01) [what+am] • Rowland&Pine 2000, 2003, Rowland et al 2003,Ambridge et al 2006.

  10. Cues • Cue is piece of (hierarchical) structure, produced in a child’s I-language on exposure to triggers in the input. • (14) Cue for V2 syntax: CP[XP CV...] (Lightfoot 2006: 86) • BUT: Given the variation in adult languages, cues must be much more fine-grained - i.e. micro-cues. (Westergaard 2007, forthcoming, Lightfoot&Westergaard 2007) • Micro-cues • (15) Cue for V2 in wh-questions (English):IntP[(wh) IntI...

  11. Predictions • Setting major word order parameter: • Massive overgeneralization • Copying frequent word combinations: • Some overgeneralization (frequent => infrequent, i.e. embedded questions, questions with long wh-elements) • Micro-cues: • Generally target-consistent production

  12. 4. Acquisition data - Norwegian • Corpus of Norwegian child language (Tromsø), Anderssen (2006). • Long wh-phrases (Westergaard 2003, 2005). • Target-consistent V2 (96%, 97/101) • Embedded wh • Target-consistent non-V2 (99.1%,107/108) • Monosyllabic wh-words • Target-consistent V2 and non-V2

  13. Word order dependent on information structure: • (16) kor ebabyen? (Ina 2;1.0) where is baby.DEF • ‘Where is the baby?’ • (17) ka løvalike å spise mamma? (Ann 2;6.21) • what lion.DEF likes to eat mommie • ‘Mommie, what does the lion like to eat?’

  14. Subject questions • Functional element som missing at early stage. • Initial word combination ka som/kem som - not copied: • (18)ADULT: nei og nei ka som skjer der • no and no what SOM happens there • ‘Oh no, what is happening there?’ CHILD: nei og nei kaskjer der. (Ole 2;1.5)

  15. 5. Acquisition data - English • As soon as aux appear, target-consistently inverted. • No overgeneralization of S-aux inversion to other clause types or verb types.(Radford 1992, Roeper 1999, 2007) • Adam? • Questions with be (Westergaard 2008) • Target-consistent inversion 96.4% (455/472) • (19) where isa box?(Adam 3;0.11)

  16. Embedded wh-clauses Target-consistent non-inversion 94.2% (97/103) • (20) So we can know [where the mailmanis].(Adam 3;2.21) • [where + is] frequent combination in main clauses • Long wh-elements • Target-consistent inversion 91.7% (35/39) (21) What kind of butterfly isthis? (Adam 3;3.18)

  17. What’s Adam’s problem? • Distinction aux/be • aux - inverted 34.2% (25/73), age 3;2-3;5 • Distinction between wh-elements • what - inverted 96.6% (689/713) • why - inverted 11.9% (7/59) (2’) Why hecan’t hit?(Adam 3;4.01)

  18. 6. Acquisition Data - Summary • Children zoom in on target word order in different contexts early - making distinctions between linguistically relevant (sub-) categories - micro-cues. • No copying of frequent word combinations - no competition between major parameter settings. • Given the complexity of word order in wh-questions, a cue may be delayed. • Adam’s grammar is conservative/makes finer distinctions than the target language (even smaller micro-cues) - e.g. does not generalize be to aux, what to why (cf. Tromsø).

  19. 7. Conclusion • (1’) Mommy goed to the store. • (2’) Why hecan’t hit? • Overgeneralization of past tense morphology -ed vs. • ‘underapplication’ of S-aux inversion. • No principled reason why goed is ungrammatical - -ed rule applies blindly to any verb. • Strictly speaking, no principled reason why (2) is ungrammatical either (cf. Indian Vernacular English). • BUT: There ARE principled reasons for when the S-aux/V2 rule applies - micro-cues,preventing children from overgeneralizing.

  20. Learning the target form has no effect on meaning/communication. • goed = went • Why hecan’t hit? = Why can’the hit? • Yet, well before the age of 3, children distinguish between main and embedded wh-questions, subjects and non-subjects, phrases and heads, auxiliaries and lexical verbs... • Why should they care?

  21. Language is certainly a powerful tool for communication, but children could not acquire its details by figuring out which ones help in communication; they learn the whole language, with all its strengths and weaknesses, because they just can’t help it. • (Pinker 1999: 194)

  22. References • Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. F., Theakston A. L. & Tomasello, M. 2006.. Comparing different accounts of inversion errors in children’s non-subject wh-questions: ‘What experimental data can tell us?’ Journal of Child Language 33, 519-557. • Anderssen, M. 2006. The Acquisition of Compositional Definiteness in Norwegian. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Tromsø. • Bhatt, R. M. 2004. Indian English: syntax. In B. Kortmann, K. Burridge, R. Mesthrie, E. W. Schneider & C. Upton (eds.), Handbook of Varieties of English 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1016-1030. • Brown, R. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diessel, H. & Tomasello, M. (2001). The acquisition of finite complement clauses in English: a usage-based approach to the development of grammatical constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 12, 97-141. • Lightfoot, D. 2006. How New Languages Emerge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. • Lightfoot, D. & Westergaard, M. 2007. Language Acquisition and Language Change: Inter-relationships. Language and Linguistics Compass. • MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. 3rd Edition. Vol. 2: The Database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

  23. Pinker, S. 1999. Word and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. • Radford, A. 1992. The acquisition of the morphosyntax of finite verbs in English. In J. M. Meisel (ed.), The Acquisition of Verb Placement: Func–tional Categories and V2 Phenomena in Language Acquisition, 23-62. Dordrecht: Kluwer. • Rizzi, L. 1996. Residual verb second and the wh-criterion. In A. Belletti & L. Rizzi (eds.), Parameters and Functional Heads. 63-90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. • Rowland, C. F. & Pine, J. M. 2000. Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: ‘What children do know?’ Journal of Child Language 27, 157-181. • Rowland, C. F. & M. Pine, J. M. 2003. The development of inversion in wh-questions: a reply to Van Valin. Journal of Child Language 30, 197-212. • Rowland, C. F., Pine, J. M., Lieven, E. M. V. & Theakston, A. L. 2003. Determinants of acquisition order in wh-questions: re-evaluating the role of caregiver speech. Journal of Child Language 30, 609-635. • Vangsnes, Øystein A. 2006. ‘Microparameters for Norwegian wh-grammars.’ Linguistic Variation Yearbook 5, pp. 187-226. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

  24. Westergaard, Marit R. 2003. ‘Word Order in Wh-Questions in a North Norwegian Dialect: Some Evidence from an Acquisition Study.’ Nordic Journal of Linguistics 26.1, 81-109. • Westergaard, Marit and Kristine Bentzen. 2007. ‘The (Non-) Effect of Input Frequency on the Acquisition of Word Order in Norwegian Embedded Clauses.’ In Insa Gülzow and Natalia Gagarina (eds.), Frequency Effects in Language Acquisition: Defining the Limits of Frequency as an Explanatory Concept, [Studies on Language Acquisition], 271-306. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. • Westergaard, Marit. Forthcoming. ‘Microvariation as Diachrony: A View from Acquisition.’ Accepted for publication in Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. • Westergaard, Marit. Forthcoming. ‘Acquisition and Change: On the Robustness of the Triggering Experience for Word Order Cues.’ Accepted for publication in Lingua. • Westergaard, Marit. 2008. ‘Item-based vs. Rule-based Learning: The Acquisition of Word Order in Wh-Questions in English and Norwegian.’ Ms., University of Tromsø. • Wexler, Kenneth. 1999. ‘Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: a new explanation of the optional infinitive stage.’ In Antonella Sorace, Caroline Heycock and Richard Shillock (eds.), Language Acquisition: Knowledge Representation and Processing, special issue of Lingua. 23-79. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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