Syntactic and morphological cues to transitivity in the input in Toba/Qom to young children from Argentina

AUDISIO, C.P.; CUNEO, P.; OJEA, G.; ROSEMBERG, C. R.

online

Encuentro; IASCL 2021 Biennial Meeting.; 2021

IASCL

The events that take place in the world are ultimately coded by languages using either transitive or intransitive constructions (Dixon & Aikhenvald, 2000).According to their tipological properties, languages use lexical, morphological (affixes) or syntactic mechanisms (number of noun phrases, word order). Learning to identify these constructions is the cornerstone of grammatical development. Some argue that syntactic mechanisms guide learning about in/transitive constructions, even in languages with rich morphology (e.g., Lidz, Gleitman and Gleitman 2003). On the other hand, the distributional properties of children’s input(i.e., the frequency and of the formal patterns) impact language acquisition and processing (e.g., e.g., MacWhinney, 1987). The distribution of transitivity cues might vary not only accordingto typological properties, but also according to the characteristics of the communicative situation, such as who the speaker and the addressee are. Aim. Investigate the frequency and consistency of syntactic and morphological transitivity cues in the input in Qom to bilingual indigenous children from Argentina. Evaluate whether their frequency varies according to context variables (speaker and addressee)