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

We examined the longitudinal corpora for twelve children in CHILDES, and found
that the age of first clear use ranged from 1;8 to 3;10, with an average of
2;5.  In some cases the first clear use was with _make_, in other cases not.
The frequency of make-causatives and of perceptual-report constructions was low
for many of the children, which makes it hard to pin down the age of
acquisition precisely.

Best,

William Snyder

Department of Linguistics
University of Connecticut


--- 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