Object-initial languages - data, a bit late

[Lise Menn]

Funknet colleagues:
        In response to Dianne Patterson's note of 29 October,
repeated below, I asked my former student Andrea Feldman to share her
diary data with us, because it contains some very interesting word
order errors. Here are Feldman's Ph.D. dissertation data (University
of Colorado 1998, p. 127) exemplifying her son's use of non-English
word orders. I think the real issue in these constructions is not
that the child is unsettled about English being an SVO language, but
that the semantic roles of the particular verb's arguments are
differently construed by the child: e.g. 'carry' is regularly
construed as if it meant something like 'ride'.
        Have fun making hypotheses about the others here; as Feldman
points out, some of the errors are not verb argument errors but
rather the typical early deictic pronoun reversals (e.g. 'pick you
up').  However, early misconstrual of 2nd and 1st person pronouns
might be important in explaining the origin of some of the incorrect
mappings from verb argument to semantic role.
        Lise Menn

Feldman's data:

"I'm carrying Steven" (Steven is being held by father) (1:11.6)
"Big lambie has blue car" (Steven sees toy lamb in his blue car)(2;0.6)
"Mama need Laura?"  (Mother has been holding Laura)((2;1.1)
"Mommy need key"  (Steven wanted to play with mother's keys) (2;2.16)
"Give me Tadi" (child's name for himself)
        (Steven wanted to be picked up by babysitter) (2;3.6)
"Laura take dada" (Father is holding Laura) (2;3.21)
"He take out" (Steven takes doll out of toy bus) (2;3.26)
"I don't like Laura to pick Daddy up." (Steven does not want father to
        pick up sister.) (2;8.0)
"I wanna pick you up" (reaches arms outward to father) (2;8.3)
"maybe she can have Michelle" (Laura is in mother's arms) (2;8.6)
"Laurie can't carry" (=X can't carry Laura) (2;10.26)

(Note that some of these are clearly deictic errors.)

>  >Comments: To: Brian MacWhinney <macw at CMU.EDU>
>  >To: FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu
>  >Status: RO
>  >
>  >Just once, in watching my child (Josh) acquire language, did I hear
>  >him produce
>  >an object initial sentence: "Pepsi want Josh"...he was probably 2.5 years
>  >old (roughly...I could dig up my notes if anyone really cares...he's
>  >17 now)...since
>  >he was with either myself or my husband all the time, this is probably the
>  >only word order violation of such magnitude that he produced
>  >outloud...probably
>  >supporting your hypothesis that that this stuff is very rare and disappears
>  >quickly once the mistake is realized.
>  >
>  >Dianne Patterson, Ph.D.
>  >University of Arizona
"I'm carrying Steven" (Steven is being held by father) (1:11.6)
"Big lambie has blue car" (Steven sees toy lamb in his blue car)(2;0.6)
"Mama need Laura?"  (Mother has been holding Laura)((2;1.1)
"Mommy need key"  (Steven wanted to play with mother's keys) (2;2.16)
"Give me Tadi" (child's name for himself)
(Steven wanted to be picked up by babysitter) (2;3.6)
"Laura take dada" (Father is holding Laura) (2;3.21)
"He take out" (Steven takes doll out of toy bus) (2;3.26)
"I don't like Laura to pick Daddy up." (Steven does not want father to
pick up sister.) (2;8.0)
"I wanna pick you up" (reaches arms outward to father) (2;8.3)
"maybe she can have Michelle" (Laura is in mother's arms) (2;8.6)
"Laurie can't carry" (=X can't carry Laura) (2;10.26)

(Note that some of these are clearly deictic errors.)
--
Lise Menn                               303-492-1609
Professor
Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado
295 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309

Adjunct Professor, University of Hunan, 2001-2005

Lise Menn's home page
http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/

"Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia"
http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf

Japanese version:
http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/kinen9.htm