Acquisition of object clitics in child Polish

Abstract

The goal of the following project is to probe into the early knowledge of the syntactic and the pragmatic components of language at the syntax-pragmatics interface, as exemplified by discourse-related elements such as object clitics. Object clitics, in addition to allowing for cross-linguistic generalizations, provide an insight into the early clause structure and the mechanisms which constrain the syntax-pragmatics interface. Cross linguistic variation has been found to be limited and well-governed, and has been attributed to the underlying syntactic mechanism, such as the Unique Checking Constraint or a number of pragmatic constraints operative in the child's grammar such as inability to mark referentiality. The present study seeks to validate the claims of the above theories by offering new data and a novel perspective. Also, it explores a theory which attempts to integrate the acquisition of syntax and pragmatics by attributing early non-adult-like structures in child grammar to a discourse linking mechanism analogous to the one postulated for root infinitives. The clitic production experiment is composed of two types of data. The naturalistic part presents the results of a pilot study based on daily language production by a monolingual Polish child age 2;1-2;9, which establishes the relative age of clitic production at the age of 2;9. The data elicitation experiment, conducted with 53 monolingual Polish children age 2;9-5;10, focuses on production of object clitics with obligatorily transitive verbs. Following the clitic production experiment, the children are tested for object clitic comprehension and knowledge of Principle B, as well as clitic referentiality resolution in pragmatically infelicitous contexts. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS They say it takes a village to raise a child. I'd say it takes a village to write a dissertation. First, my mom, Maria, and dad, Roman, who are French professors, inspired my linguistic curiosity. Then one day, Professor Bożena Rozwadowska, from The University of Wrocław, my mentor at the Pedagogical Academy in Czestochowa, Poland, said 'You should go to the US and do your PhD there." At The University of Iowa, there were Professors William Davies with his brilliant Syntax I class, Elena Gavruseva with her inspiring child language seminar, Roumyana Slabakova with her sharp insights and profound expertise in language acquisition, and many more linguistics professors who contributed to my education: Catherine Ringen, Alice Davison, Jill Beckman, Jerzy Rubach, and Rob Chametzky. I also thank Professor Jim Maxey for his help with understanding statistics, and more importantly for his extraordinary kindness. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to all who were directly involved in my dissertation. First of all, I am indebted to my dissertation advisor, Professor Elena Gavruseva, whose constant guidance and support made it all possible. Second, I would like to thank the members of my doctoral committee, Professors Roumyana Slabakova, William Davies, Alice Davison, and Jason Rothman, for the...

Object pronouns, clitics, and omissions in child Polish and Ukrainian

“…We focus on the role of the individual language, the children's age, and the referent's animacy in the choice of DO type. The results show that null objects are a licit option in the grammars of Polish and Ukrainian adult native speakers and monolingual children (vs. Tryzna, 2009). However, children tend to overuse this option in some contexts as late as the age of 5 (cf.…”

“…Omission of DOs in Polish has only been examined in one previous study, that of Tryzna (2009). This study provides naturalistic and experimental data from young L1 Polish children.…”

“…According to this hypothesis, there are two groups of languages: languages with past-participle agreement, in which object clitics are particularly difficult to acquire (e.g., Catalan, French, and Italian), and languages where object clitic omission occurs infrequently even at early stages (e.g., Spanish and Romanian). However, the correlation described by Wexler et al does not always hold (for an overview, see Tryzna, 2009).…”

“…Both Polish and Ukrainian allow various elliptical constructions that must be interpreted based on information provided by the linguistic (discourse) or extralinguistic (environmental) contexts. In natural speech, even the DOs of obligatorily transitive verbs can be omitted (Kowaluk, 1999; but, for a different view on Polish, see Tryzna, 2009). Null DOs can occur when the antecedent appears in a preceding statement (see (7a) for Polish; (7b) for Ukrainian) or in a question ((8a) for Polish; (8b) for Ukrainian).…”

“…, assuming that he has eaten the cake, can be answered in at least two ways: with the full sentence structure in (1a) or (2a) and with the omitted subject structure in (1b) or (2b). In addition, native speakers of both Polish and Ukrainian might produce sentences with both arguments omitted, as in (1c) or (2c) (but, for a different observation, see Tryzna, 2009). 1 …”