causative constructions

[William Snyder]

Dear Aliyah,

In a 1997 paper ("The Structure and Acquisition of English Dative
Constructions," Linguistic Inquiry 28:281-317), Karin Stromswold and I looked
at the age of acquisition of what we called "causative and perceptual report"
constructions.  This category lumped together the following sentence types:

        Fred made John leave.
        Fred made John wash the car.
        Fred saw/watched/heard John leave.


We examined the longitudinal corpora for twelve children in CHILDES, and found
that these constructions were acquired





--- Aliyah MORGENSTERN <morgen at idf.ext.jussieu.fr> wrote:

> Dear info-CHILDES,
> Does anyone know if children make "mistakes" when using causative
> constructions in English such as
> "Dad made me go to my room"
> (for example adding TO "Dad made me to go to my room" which is the kind of
> mistake Polish immigrants make?
> And at what age do you think such constructions are acquired by English
> speaking children?
>
> Thank you very much for your help, or for references on the subject,
>
> Aliyah MORGENSTERN
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines
> Lyon-France
> aliyah.morgenstern at ens-lsh.fr
> 06 19 53 66 01
>
> 12 rue Saint Fiacre
> 75002 PARIS
> morgen at idf.ext.jussieu.fr
> 01 42 33 29 05
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
>


=====
Prof. William B. Snyder
Department of Linguistics
University of Connecticut