The Maturation of Grammatical Principles: Evidence from Russian Unaccusatives

Abstract

This article tests the hypothesis that young children have a maturational difficulty with A-chain formation that makes them unable to represent unaccusative verbs in an adultlike fashion. We report the results of a test of children's performance on the genitive-of-negation construction in Russian, which, for adults, is an ''unaccusativity diagnostic,'' since genitive case is allowed to appear on the underlying direct object argument of unaccusatives as well as on direct objects of standard transitive verbs within the scope of negation. We show that although Russian children know the properties of the construction, they have notable difficulty using it with unaccusative verbs. Since the input evidence for genitive of negation with unaccusative verbs is quite robust, we interpret our results as support for the hypothesis.Studies of early language acquisition help us understand the biological roots of language. For example, the growing body of work that reveals extremely early knowledge of many properties of language (e.g., Wexler 1996, Crain and Thornton 1998, and references therein) is particularly interesting in light of debates over the ''poverty of the stimulus'' and the nature of Universal Sergey Avrutin conducted an informal pilot experiment for the project reported here and participated in the earliest discussion of this work. We wish to thank him for his invaluable assistance and encouragement. Ron Fein collected preliminary data relevant to our experiment and was an active participant in the early stages of this work. We are grateful for his contributions to this project. Marina Shatskaya and Alexei Semenov persuaded the directors of two Moscow kindergartens to let us conduct our experiment on their premises. We are grateful to them for their energetic efforts on our behalf; we are also grateful to the staff of these kindergartens for their helpfulness and good-natured tolerance of the disruptions we caused. For helpful advice and discussion, we wish to thank Hagit Borer,

Acquisition of the Malagasy voicing system: implications for the adult grammar

“…They further proposed that prior to that age children have only adjectival passives, which do not involve A-chain formation. The A-chain deficit hypothesis (ACDH) is also argued for in Babyonyshev et al (2001). 14 The ACDH is not uncontroversial.…”

“…We note, however, that their results, though suggestive, are based on a very small sample of only 8 children and have not been replicated in other studies. 14 Babyonyshev, Ganger, Pesetsky and Wexler (2001) propose another possible interpretation of the delay in the acquisition of passives, viz. that the early grammar requires an external argument.…”

An investigation on the comprehension of Persian passives in typical development and autism

“…However, this line of argument is not compelling, due to the fact that child language acquisition exhibits numerous cases of early acquisition of underrepresented structurescases of acquisition under poverty of stimulus (see for instance the acquisition of Slavic multiple interrogatives, very rare in the input; Grebenyova 2011, Gavarró, Lewandowski andMarkova 2010). Side by side with these cases, the opposite scenario emerges: constructions which are abundant in the input are late acquisitions in children -this is what Babyonyshev et al (2001) termed late acquisition under abundance of the stimulus -see the example provided in the same paper on the Russian genitive of negation. Given these findings, compounded with some empirical problems with the research on Sesotho (see Crawford 2008), maturation has been hypothesised to be the source of the late comprehension of passives, whether maturation of A-chains (Borer and Wexler 1992), maturation of thetatransmission (Fox and Grodzinsky 1998), maturation of the properties of defective phases (Wexler 2004), or maturation of the mechanisms regulating intervention (Orfitelli 2012).…”

Against Covert A-Movement in Russian Unaccusatives

“…The A-movement that Babyonyshev et al (2001) investigates is the movement of the internal argument of an unaccusative predicate to subject position. In English, the theme of an unaccusative predicate begins as an internal argument and moves overtly to the subject position, (1) (Perlmutter 1978, Pesetsky 1982, Burzio 1986, Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995.…”