Children'sendstate neglect: agentive vs. causative subjects
Autor
García Sanz, Ainara
Metadatos
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First language acquisition studies (e.g. Gentner,1978;
Gropen, Pinker, Hollander & Goldberg, 1991;
Wittek, 2002; van Hout,2005;2008)
have reported that children accept perfective
change-of-state predicates, which
theoretically
generate completion
entailment, to refer to non-culminating events. This is known in the literature as the endstate neglect. In an attempt to interpret this phenomenon, three main hypotheses
have been proposed: the
Manner Bias (Gentner, 1978),
the Weak Endstate Interpretation
(Wittek, 2002)
and the Morphological Salience (van Hout, 2005; 2008).
However, as
neither of these approaches have succeeded in providing a
final explanation for
children's endstate neglect, this study explores the scope of the Agent Control
Hypothesis (Dermirdache & Martin, 2015), a recent theory
that analyses
the influence
of subjects' agentivity over children's interpretation of change-of-state verbs. According
to this new hypothesis, the presence of agentive subjects correlates with children's
acceptance of completion entailment.
Based on this theory, the present study
examines
Basque children and adult language in an attempt to identify whether the phenomenon
of endstate neglect correlates with
the presence of an agentive subject. By means of
an
experimental
study on the influence of causative and agentive subjects over children's
interpretation of punctual, change-of-state events, this paper argues that the results do not support the Agent Control Hypothesis.
Instead, in line with previous studies,
the results of the present study suggest that
the endstate neglect
is not relatedto change-of-state verbs but to incremental verbs, which seem to
hold some grade of ambiguity for
speakers'
interpretation.