Infin. vs. Indic. in Russian

[William B. Snyder]

Dear Asma (and Info-CHILDES),

Eva Bar-Shalom and I have a short paper due to appear in the BUCLD 23
proceedings, in which we examine the uses of morphologically infinitival,
indicative, and imperative verbs in the early speech of the Russian
child Varya (CHILDES, Protassova corpus).

The main findings are as follows:

+ All three verb-types were attested in Varya's speech in the earliest
transcript (at 1;6).

+ Varya's infinitives often occurred in apparently matrix contexts; these
"root infinitives" frequently (though not always) had an imperative-like
interpretation (e.g. "shirt to-remove" as a request that the child's
shirt be removed).

+ Despite the similarity of interpretation between root infinitives and
imperatives, these verb-forms exhibited different syntactic properties.
Notably, imperatives (as well as indicatives) occured with the negation
marker 'ne' in about 10% of their uses, but Varya's root infinitives were
never negated.  (This contrast was robustly significant by Fisher exact
test.)

The findings for Varya are consistent with Gvozdev's classic (1961)
report on his diary study of the acquisition of Russian by his son Zhenya.
According to Gvozdev, Zhenya began producing imperative verb-forms even
earlier than indicative ones.  Moreover, shortly after beginning to
produce imperatives, Zhenya (like Varya) started to produce matrix
infinitives with a "command-like" meaning.

Thus, at least in these particular Russian children, the morphologically
infinitival and imperative forms were very early acquisitions, possibly
even a bit earlier than their indicative counterparts.

With best regards,

William Snyder

Department of Linguistics
University of Connecticut

References:

Bar-Shalom, E. and Snyder, W. (in press) "On the relationship between
root infinitives and imperatives in early Child Russian."  In _Proceedings
of the 23rd Meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language
Development_.  Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Gvozdev, A. (1961) _Formirovanie u rebenka grammaticheskogo stroja
russkogo jazyka, Parts I and II_.  Moscow: Akad. Pedagog. Nauk.


On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, Asma Siddiki wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I don't know the answer to the following question and would like some help
> please.
>
> Do children learn the
> infinitive later than the indicative, and if so, then why?
>
> references????  - thanks.
>
> Asma
> ************************************************************
> Asma Siddiki		     Dept. of Experimental Psychology
> Oriel College                South Parks Road
> Oxford University            Oxford University
> OX1 4EW                      OX1 3UD
> *************************************************************
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>