18.3475, Diss: Lang Acq/Syntax: Estigarribia: 'Asking Questions: language va...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-18-3475. Wed Nov 21 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.3475, Diss: Lang Acq/Syntax: Estigarribia: 'Asking Questions: language va...'

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1)
Date: 20-Nov-2007
From: Bruno Estigarribia < estigarribia at mail.fpg.unc.edu >
Subject: Asking Questions: language variation and language acquisition

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:25:54
From: Bruno Estigarribia [estigarribia at mail.fpg.unc.edu]
Subject: Asking Questions: language variation and language acquisition
E-mail this message to a friend:
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Institution: Stanford University 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2007 

Author: Bruno Estigarribia

Dissertation Title: Asking Questions: language variation and language
acquisition 

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): English (eng)


Dissertation Director(s):
Eve V. Clark
Ivan A. Sag
Thomas Wasow
Arnold M. Zwicky

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of English yes/no 
questions. Previous studies have restricted themselves to the 
acquisition of 'inversion" or movement transformations. As a result, a 
great deal of child and adult data which do not show inversion (non-
canonical questions) have never been analyzed.

My account remedies this by providing the first model of acquisition that
integrates language variation as an important motor in development. 
My main hypothesis is that children hear a variety of question forms of 
different complexity from adults (Coming? You coming? You're 
coming? Are you coming?), and that this variation facilitates learning. I 
show first that the different variants can be ordered in a relation of 
increasing structural complexity. I use American English data from 
CHILDES to show that parents use all forms in their speech to 
children, and that in fact, the canonical "inverted" form is rarer than 
people have assumed (between 33% and 57% of all yes/no 
questions). Reduced and declarative forms are quite frequent and 
productive.

I then analyze child time series data to show that simpler forms emerge
early and facilitate the acquisition of more complex forms. This 
incremental structure-building process depends on the availability of 
an adjunction strategy that takes reduced child questions and 
augments them with initial auxiliaries and subjects. This account draws 
on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development: each developmental 
stage lays the foundation for the kinds of knowledge currently 
accessible to the learner. Moreover, I show that the availability of this 
incremental process is contingent on the high frequency of non-
canonical questions in parental speech: the single child in my corpus 
who receives mostly canonical input employs a completely different, 
top down strategy.

The approach here differs from both movement-based approaches 
and item-based ones. It shifts the focus away from problems of 
learnability that seldom assess how child knowledge at a given point 
determines what is learnable and how. It also adopts a view of the 
target as a constraint-based, surfacist grammar, with no movement 
transformations. In addition, I claim that the structure-building process 
is not necessarily based on specific lexical items or combinations 
thereof. 





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