What is it about?
The present paper reports on the results of a study investigating the role of frequency in the acquisition of transitivity alternations in Greek. Results of a sentence-picture-matching task with child L1 learners of Greek (age range: 2;11–5;11) and a group of adult controls, show a clear developmental pattern in the number of interpretations children and adults allow. The child and adult data from the SPM task is further compared with frequency counts of the readings that some of these verbs exhibit in written corpora of Greek (ILSP corpus (formal register) and a Web-based corpus created via automatic searches on the Internet (informal register). Finally, a small-scale analysis of child-directed speech from Stephany’s (1997) data in CHILDES.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Our data show that children (i) have abstract knowledge of syntactic structures and transitivity alternations, (ii) are sensitive to morphological differences (although they have not mastered Voice morphology yet), but (iii) lack sufficient exposure to pragmatic properties that would lead them to form verb classes and thus regulate their responses as adults do, we can account for the attested child preferences (cf. Tsimpli, 2006).
Perspectives
Co-writing this paper with a leading expert in language acquisition was very important for me. This work presented part of my PhD dissertation and evaluated the role of (input) frequency in the development of transitivity alternations in Greek L1 which are partly based on Voice changes.
Dr. Georgia Fotiadou
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The acquisition of transitivity alternations in Greek: Does frequency count?, Lingua, November 2010, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2010.06.011.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
