Hierarchy of Two-Place Predicates

Thu Aug 16 16:24:36 UTC 2012

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  Nozomi Tanaka (student at Hawaii) did an (unpublished) search of the 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
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> UMass South College
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