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

AUDISIO, CYNTHIA PAMELA; CÚNEO, PAOLA; OJEA, GLADYS LILIANA; ROSEMBERG, CELIA RENATA

Philadelphia

Congreso; International Association for the Study of Child Language Virtual Conference; 2021

Attention has been often given to the complexity entailed by the task of learning verbs. Previous research has studied the information children use to infer verb transitivity value. The evidence available to infer it depends on the typological characteristics of the language and their distribution in the input. For instance, Toba/Qom (Guaycuruan) presents morphological strategies to increase or reduce verb valency that indicate whether the event expressed by the verb is causative. Notwithstanding, some researchers argue that the syntactic mechanisms for the expression of transitivity are more considered, even in languages with rich morphology (Göksun, Küntay and Naigles 2008, Lee and Naigles 2008, Lidz, Gleitman and Gleitman 2003).Thus, the frequency, consistency and co-occurrence of syntactic (quantity of nominal elements and order of constituents) and morphological (presence of affixes) transitivity cues were studied on a portion of the input in Toba/Qom to three male children and a female child (M=1;9) from Chaco (Argentina).The results showed that the omission of arguments is frequent and it is not possible to successfully pair one nominal with one-participant non-causal events and two nominals with two-participant causal events. There were not two contrasting orders according to their transitivity value. Although they compensate argument elision in 20% of the input, morphological indicators are absent in most of the utterances, especially in child-directed speech (see Figure below). On the other hand, in almost half of the sample the syntactic and/or morphological properties are not consistently associated with some transitivity value. In the rest of the input, morphology (32.7%) or the order of constituents and the quantity of nominals (25.2%) consistently express the transitivity. The most consistent syntactic and morphological values of both types of indicators co-occur in low proportion.