Indefinite Nouns in Discourse

[nbatman at hunter.cuny.edu]

Hello,

A little while ago I posted an inquiry about indefinie animate nouns in 
discourse.  My goal was to find out information in experimental work or 
corpora analysis about how grammatical roles are assigned to two 
animate nouns when one of them is indefinite. In the experiment that I 
conducted, in the absence of morphological cues and with ambiguous word 
order children and adults preferred an animate definite noun as a 
subject over an animate indefinite noun.  Theres Gruter had similar 
findings with her L1 controls in an L2 study with Egnlish speakers 
learning German. (Grüter, T. (in press).  Another take on the L2 
initial state.  Language Acquisition. )

Thanks to everyone who responded to my query.  Here is a summary of the 
responses.

Hickmann, M. & Hendriks, H. (1999).  Cohesion and anaphora in 
children?s narratives: a comparison of English, French, German, and 
Mandarin Chinese.  Journal of Child Language, 26, 419-451.

Höhle, B., Weissenborn, J., Kiefer, D., Schulz, A, & Schmitz, M (2002) 
The origins of syntactic categorization for lexical elements: The role 
of determiners. In J. Costa & M.J. Freitas (eds.) Proceedings of the 
GALA 2001 Conference on Language Acquisition. Lisboa, Associação 
Portugesa de Linguística, 106-111.

Kail, M. & Hickmann, M. (1992). French children's ability to introduce 
referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge. First 
Language, 12, 73-94.
  Kempe, V. & MacWhinney, B. (1999). Processing of morphological and 
semantic cues in Russian and German.  Language and Cognitive Processes, 
14, 129-171.

Limber, J. (1976). Unraveling competence, performance, and pragmatics 
in the speech of young children. Journal of Child Language, 3, 309-318.

YAMAMOTO, M. 1999. Animacy and Reference: Studies in Language Companion 
Series. Amsterdam / Philidelphia: John Benjamins.

Best regards,
Natalie
-- 
Natalie Batmanian
Post-doctoral Fellow
Hunter College
Psychology Department
(212)773-5557/8