Hierarchy of Two-Place Predicates

Masahiko Minami mminami at sfsu.edu
Thu Aug 16 17:02:56 UTC 2012 

Dear Tom and Brian,

Thank you so much for your input. This summer I have been looking at English-Japanese bilingual children’s use of complex grammatical measures, such as transitive and intransitive verbs, active andpassive voices, and durative and completive forms when they narrated stories using “Frog, where are you?”

Very recently, then, with my personal communication with Tasaku Tsunoda, I found that he wrote the following:

“Melissa Bowerman (p.c.) informed me that the two children whose language acquisition she had observed had produced the following sentences, among others.
I’m hitting on something.  (Melissa Bowerman, p.c.)
My feet don’t touch to the ground.  (Melissa Bowerman, p.c.)”

Leaving aside monolingual/bilingual and age issues, what he wrote above is different from what I observed in my bilingual study. One bilingual child, for instance, narrated, “The reindeer fell the boy to the pond,” and she used the verb “fall” as a transitive verb instead of an intransitive verb.

This is why I became interested in finding any research supporting Tsunoda’s remarks in the case of L1 acquisition in particular.

Thank you again.

Masahiko

From: Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu<mailto:macw at cmu.edu>>
Reply-To: <info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>>
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:24:36 -0400
To: <info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>>
Subject: Re: Hierarchy of Two-Place Predicates

Tom,

     If we are talking about Japanese, I couldn't agree with you more.  Nozomi Tanaka (student at Hawaii) did an (unpublished) search of the
parental input in the Japanese CHILDES database and the amount of case marker deletion, argument omission, and order variation was pretty
stunning.  But a look at the Eve corpus for English shows a very different pattern.  There are still omissions, to be sure, but if an NP (not PP) follows a transitive
verb, it is almost always the object of the verb.  I don't think the English-learning child has to ask whether or not they are learning any particular type of language.
They just see where these nouns are occurring, what their role is, and they make the logical item-based conclusion that objects follow their verbs, whereas agents precede them.
If this cue were as unreliable as you suggest, they would hold off on that conclusion.  In Japanese, they probably do, looking instead for cues from the discourse
or the situation, but also making note of the times when the case markers actually do appear.

--Brian MacWhinney

On Aug 16, 2012, at 12:14 PM, Tom Roeper <roeper at linguist.umass.edu<mailto:roeper at linguist.umass.edu>> wrote:

Dear Brian and Masahiko---

     Assuming a role for English is the classic acquisition error of assuming that children
already know what they have to learn.  I take it that it is precisely the question of what
first steps children take when they do not know if they are in a free word order language
or not that we have to characterize.  Although it may seem that the child must simply
connect: John eats hotdog
to context and the answer is clear, the child will also hear: the hotdog was eaten
    "here's your hotdog, now eat"
    "hotdogs you love"
and so forth.

Tom

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu<mailto:macw at cmu.edu>> wrote:
Dear Masahiko and Tom,

      I am still not sure I understand Masahiko's question, but the claim that children make errors such as "I'm hitting on something" is an interesting one.  My own child language error filters are telling me that errors of this type are quite rare.  However, I can they could arise occasionally from analogy with constructions found in the input such as "I'm pushing on the table" and "My feet don't touch to the ground" could arise from "My feet don't reach to the ground."
    This level of analogic productivity is common, although the specific types mentioned here would seem rare, probably because of competition from the stronger pattern in English for placing the direct object after the verb.
     But Masahiko also seems to suggest that children are in search of some method of disambiguating subject and object.  But English has already provided them with this through its consistent and reliable placement of the subject or agent before the verb and the object after the verb.  I think one would have to turn to a language with freer word order to find any evidence that children are themselves in search of new methods for marking case.
     Analyses of the introduction of new case markings and wider issues such as Differential Object Marking (DOM) typically involve historical processes, not particular child language errors or creations.  This is not to say that children have no role in historical change, but I doubt that they are the main contributors.

-- Brian MacWhinney

On Aug 16, 2012, at 11:08 AM, Tom Roeper <roeper at linguist.umass.edu<mailto:roeper at linguist.umass.edu>> wrote:

I think children are more likely to omit the prepositions and say things like:
    I cried stairs/ I'm going beach
even in places where they are called for.  There is some discussion of this
in my book The Prism of Grammar--MIT

Tom Roeper


On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Masahiko Minami <mminami at sfsu.edu<mailto:mminami at sfsu.edu>> wrote:
Tasaku Tsunoda proposed a classification of predicates, in various versions, and its latest (1985) has been referred to as the hierarchy of two-place predicates (‘HTPP’).

My understanding of HTPP is as follows:

When a two-place predicate R(x,y) is used to describe an event involving two participants, usually an agent and a patient, it is of utmost importance to avoid ambiguity as to which noun phrase corresponds to the first argument x (the agent) and which to the second argument y (the patient). For this purpose, case can be used to mark one of the arguments. If one argument is case marked, this already suffices for the purpose of disambiguation. Thus, from the distinguishing perspective, there is no need to case mark both arguments. Neither would it be necessary to case mark the one and only argument of a one-place (intransitive) predicate.

In Tsunoda’s recent paper, he presents the following:
I’m hitting on something.
My feet don’t touch to the ground.

While the above examples do not involve the preposition on or toin adults’ English, children may initially include these prepositions but later abandon these prepositions, in accordance with the grammar of adults’ English.

If there are papers referring to such phenomena, please let me know.

Masahiko Minami
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Tom Roeper
Dept of Lingiustics
UMass South College
Amherst, Mass. 01003 ISA
413 256 0390

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