Verbs in child grammar the acquisition of the primitive elements of the VP at the syntax-semantics interface

Abstract

An issue in the study of language acquisition that has attracted much attention is the nature of early verbs. At around the age of 2, children start to combine words and to produce the first verbs. Verbal items appear later than nouns and refer to the relational concepts in the world that are represented in syntax through the argument structure. This dissertation aims to examine the features of the first verbal productions in Italian. Since the appearance of verbs implies the mastery of a procedure of mapping between syntactic positions and semantic roles, the topic under examination has consequences not only for the description of the timeline of the acquisition of the lexicon, but also for the definition of a general model of the interface between syntax and lexical semantics in the early stages. The proposal is that syntactic-semantic features are at work early in child grammar in determining the clausal derivation. Verbs involve structural and idiosyncratic meaning: while structural meaning is derived by the few syntactic frames (number and features of the arguments) which a verb can appear in, idiosyncratic meaning is given by the relations in the world that each verbal root denotes. The architecture of the syntax-semantics interface for verbs implies a mapping procedure from few syntactic frames to many relations in the world and/or vice versa. The structural meaning of early verbs is explored through an analysis of the distribution of the overt arguments and the auxiliaries in a corpus of spontaneous speech of children and adults. The results will show that the lexical classes of verbs influence the distribution of null subjects and the choice of the position in which the subjects are expressed in the sentences. Verb classes also seem at work in the selection and the distribution of the auxiliaries: children properly select auxiliaries depending on the lexical-syntactic information encoded in the VP layer. At the age of the appearance of the first verbs, children are simultaneously learning the syntactic derivations that involve the IP and the CP layers. Some differences between child and target grammar are found in the syntactic domains used for the spell-out at syntax-phonology interface: a lower initial spell-out domain may disfavor the derivations to high clausal positions where scope discourse semantic features like Topic and Focus are checked. Two experimental tasks are designed to observe the effects of the presence of an overt object in the VP in determining the aspectual reading. The interaction between the perfective aspect encoded in the present perfect (passato prossimo) and the lexical aspect of the VPs is investigated in the production and comprehension of perfective compound tenses. The results show that children do not use the present perfect with all verbs like adults: the aspectual information encoded in the VP, both the structural meaning linked to the projection of the objects and the idiosyncratic meaning of the verbal root, influences children’s understanding of aspectual perfective morphology till the age of 7. The main conclusions of the present work show that the relations at syntax- semantics interface are already well established when the first verbs are uttered by children and influence the pattern of distribution of overt/null arguments, the clausal derivation to scope-discourse semantic position, and the aspectual interpretation. While we cannot determine whether the first verbs are bootstrapped by the semantic or the syntactic representations, we can argue that both the structural and idiosyncratic meanings encoded in the VPs are at work in the different stages of acquisition of a language.An issue in the study of language acquisition that has attracted much attention is the nature of early verbs. At around the age of 2, children start to combine words and to produce the first verbs. Verbal items appear later than nouns and refer to the relational concepts in the world that are represented in syntax through the argument structure. This dissertation aims to examine the features of the first verbal productions in Italian. Since the appearance of verbs implies the mastery of a procedure of mapping between syntactic positions and semantic roles, the topic under examination has consequences not only for the description of the timeline of the acquisition of the lexicon, but also for the definition of a general model of the interface between syntax and lexical semantics in the early stages. The proposal is that syntactic-semantic features are at work early in child grammar in determining the clausal derivation. Verbs involve structural and idiosyncratic meaning: while structural meaning is derived by the few syntactic frames (number and features of the arguments) which a verb can appear in, idiosyncratic meaning is given by the relations in the world that each verbal root denotes. The architecture of the syntax-semantics interface for verbs implies a mapping procedure from few syntactic frames to many relations in the world and/or vice versa. The structural meaning of early verbs is explored through an analysis of the distribution of the overt arguments and the auxiliaries in a corpus of spontaneous speech of children and adults. The results will show that the lexical classes of verbs influence the distribution of null subjects and the choice of the position in which the subjects are expressed in the sentences. Verb classes also seem at work in the selection and the distribution of the auxiliaries: children properly select auxiliaries depending on the lexical-syntactic information encoded in the VP layer. At the age of the appearance of the first verbs, children are simultaneously learning the syntactic derivations that involve the IP and the CP layers. Some differences between child and target grammar are found in the syntactic domains used for the spell-out at syntax-phonology interface: a lower initial spell-out domain may disfavor the derivations to high clausal positions where scope discourse semantic features like Topic and Focus are checked. Two experimental tasks are designed to observe the effects of the presence of an overt object in the VP in determining the aspectual reading. The interaction between the perfective aspect encoded in the present perfect (passato prossimo) and the lexical aspect of the VPs is investigated in the production and comprehension of perfective compound tenses. The results show that children do not use the present perfect with all verbs like adults: the aspectual information encoded in the VP, both the structural meaning linked to the projection of the objects and the idiosyncratic meaning of the verbal root, influences children’s understanding of aspectual perfective morphology till the age of 7. The main conclusions of the present work show that the relations at syntax- semantics interface are already well established when the first verbs are uttered by children and influence the pattern of distribution of overt/null arguments, the clausal derivation to scope-discourse semantic position, and the aspectual interpretation. While we cannot determine whether the first verbs are bootstrapped by the semantic or the syntactic representations, we can argue that both the structural and idiosyncratic meanings encoded in the VPs are at work in the different stages of acquisition of a language.

Date of Award	16 Sept 2014
Original language	English
Supervisor	Luigi Rizzi (Director) & Jaume Mateu Fontanals (Director)