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

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

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.