Splitting the notion of 'agent': case-marking in early child Hindi.
Two construals of agency are evaluated as possible innate biases guiding case-marking in children. A BROAD construal treats agentive arguments of multi-participant and single-participant events as being similar. A NARROWER construal is restricted to agents of multi-participant events. In Hindi, ergative case-marking is associated with agentive participants of multi-participant, perfective actions. Children relying on a broad or narrow construal of agent are predicted to overextend ergative case-marking to agentive participants of transitive imperfective actions and/or intransitive actions. Longitudinal data from three children acquiring Hindi (1;7 to 3;9) reveal no overextension errors, suggesting early sensitivity to distributional patterns in the input.
Narasimhan
Bhuvana
B
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PB 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. bhuvana@mpi.nl
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D007223:Infant; D008037:Linguistics; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary