A comparative analysis of passive constructions in English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa: Grammar and acquisition

Abstract

Whilst literature on the acquisition of passive constructions by speakers of European languages abounds, there is a dearth of grammatical descriptions of passive constructions in (especially South) African languages that may serve as a basis for acquisition studies. Furthermore, the majority of studies have focused on monolingual participants only, leaving the typical multilingual African language acquisition context underrepresented. This paper addresses these gaps in the literature by offering an in-depth cross-linguistic comparison of passive constructions in the three official languages of the Western Cape, a province in South Africa, namely the Germanic languages English and Afrikaans and the Southern Bantu language isiXhosa. The grammatical description of passives in these languages covers the nature of the passive verb complex; the placement of the object and, in long passives, subject arguments; movement of the object argument across clause boundaries in infinitival clauses; existential passive constructions; case assignment; restrictions on passivisation; and verbal versus adjectival passive constructions. This information may serve as basis for finer syntactic analyses, studies of cross-linguistic bootstrapping, and also descriptive grammars. The paper finally presents normative data for the acquisition of passive constructions by monolingual speakers of English and by speakers of languages closely related to Afrikaans and isiXhosa (such data not yet being readily available for the latter two languages). The reported higher frequency of passive constructions in Bantu languages is cited as a possible explanation for the relatively early acquisition of this otherwise notoriously late-acquired construction.

Lexical and grammatical development in trilingual speakers of isiXhosa, English and Afrikaans

“…Among prospective trilingual participants, an age of first exposure before 4 years in the case of each of the child’s three languages (cf. Potgieter, 2014 , for justification), as well as a reported ability to communicate meaningfully in all and only the three languages of interest to this study, were considered as selection criteria. As for the monolingual groups, the typical high level of sociolinguistic diversity of most low SES areas in the Western Cape made finding prospective participants with exclusive exposure to only one language nearly impossible.…”

“…(For an in-depth comparative grammatical description of passives in these three languages, cf. Potgieter, 2014 ).…”

“…Information regarding the trilingual participants’ language exposure was gathered by means of a specially designed parental LBQ in conjunction with a teacher report (cf. Potgieter, 2014 , for copies of these instruments) and analysed using the Utrecht Bilingual Language Exposure Calculator (UBiLEC; Unsworth, 2011a , 2011b , 2013 ). The LBQ mainly enquires as to the child’s language exposure over time and at the time of testing, within various contexts, and includes a section requiring an hour-by-hour description of a typical day in the child’s life (both during the week and over weekends), with specific information on the languages used in each context and their relative distribution.…”

“…In short, an exactly on-target passive sentence or accurate passive sentence using a different yet suited passive verb was awarded two marks; a passive sentence with a morphological error on the verb or a long passive sentence that is on target except for an error in the agentive phrase was awarded a mark of one, and any answer that does not constitute a passive sentence was awarded a mark of zero. See Potgieter ( 2014 ) for a more complete description of the scoring process and the justification behind it.…”