Hierarchy of Two-Place Predicates

Fri Aug 17 15:09:10 UTC 2012

The nature of what prepositions are overused or swallowed is critically
important.
IN general, relational preps are absorbed (as depend on -=> dependable)
while
referential ones are not.  So in compounds we can convert"made in a
factory" into
"factory-made" but where referentially relevant meaning is involved, then
it cannot
be swallowed:   fell near a tree=>*tree-fell.
  Children do the same---dropping adjunct PP's (I cried stairs) but not for
real
arguments usually: play with Bill [See discussion in my book The Prism of
Grammar].
So it would not be surprising if these forms are spontaneously extended.
     This is, indeed, way beyond the early telegraphic stages where the
first parameters
of word-order and so forth are set.

Tom Roeper

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 3:30 AM, Guy Modica <guy.modica at gmail.com> wrote:

> The children Masahiko mentions are clearly well beyond the two-word or
> telegraphic stage. This hasn't been addressed, but are these children
> Japanese-English sequential bilinguals by any chance? The well known
> phenomenon of negative transfer could have an explanatory role here. Among
> Japanese L2 learners of English, the argument structure of Japanese verbs
> is often applied to English verbs. For example "I recommend you to go" -
> meaning "you should go" and not "I nominate you to go." This is well
> embedded and widely found in Japanese English.
>
> In Masahiko's examples, *hit* could be identified with *ataru* - a lexeme
> acquired early. *Touch* is semantically close to *sawaru*. Both of these
> case mark the "patient" with *ni* - usually analyzed as heading a PP
> (postpositional). Another close synonym of hit is *tataku* which does take
> the hitee as a DO with the particle *wo*. But I don't believe this is
> acquired as early as *ataru*.
>
> Regards and good health.
>
> Guy Modica
> Tokyo
>
> On Aug 17, 2012, at 2:24 AM, Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu> wrote:
>
> 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  Nozomi Tanaka (student at Hawaii) did an (unpublished) search of the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>
> 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> 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>
>> 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>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 to* *in
>>> 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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-- 
Tom Roeper
Dept of Lingiustics
UMass South College
Amherst, Mass. 01003 ISA
413 256 0390

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