Finiteness in adult and child German.
Item
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Title
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Finiteness in adult and child German.
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Identifier
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AAI9807956
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identifier
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9807956
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Creator
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Lasser, Ingeborg Elisabeth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Janet Fodor
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics | Psychology, Cognitive | Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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This thesis addresses the fact that two-year-old children acquiring German and other languages productively use finite sentences with correct verb inflections and word-order, but also frequently produce non-finite root clauses where adults would use finite constructions. This behavior in learners has presented a challenge to acquisition theory.;The solution proposed here is based on two main claims: First, root infinitivals (RIs) are an adult phenomenon as well. Second, adult and child RIs differ not in their form but primarily in their conditions of use.;These points are established by a discussion of naturally-occurring adult German RIs, and by a corpus study comprising over 5000 root clauses from two German adults, and approximately 2000 root clauses from two German two-year-olds. The data reveal that while adults produce RIs with lower frequency than children, they use them in a much wider variety of interpretations than has previously been assumed.;A comparison of child and adult RIs shows that the children mainly disobey pragmatic constraints (e.g. that subjects, temporal interpretation, and illocutionary force be recoverable from the discourse context). A proportion of child RIs are such that, if the pragmatic constraints had been respected, they would be well-formed sentences of German which could have been uttered by an adult in discourse.;A careful linguistic analysis of finite sentences indicates that an intricate system of interpretive properties of the entire sentence determines which particular morphological verb form is appropriate in each context. This implies that even complete knowledge of verbal inflections and verb-placement constraints is insufficient to ensure correct verb use. Rather, a learner has to acquire subtle relationships between interpretive aspects of sentences, and verbal morpho-syntax. Since these relationships differ even across typologically close languages, so a considerable amount of leaning is required for correctly expressing finiteness on verbs.;The RI phenomenon looks to be a heterogeneous one, deriving from a number of different finiteness-related deficits in learners. It is suggested that RIs are favored by learners whose abilities of marking finiteness are not yet complete. RIs are suitable default constructions, because non-finite forms are the least specified with respect to finiteness and also with respect to other interpretive properties of the sentence.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
