In:Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn
Edited by Caroline F. Rowland, Anna L. Theakston, Ben Ambridge and Katherine E. Twomey
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 27] 2020
► pp. 113–130
The retreat from transitive-causative overgeneralization errors
A review and diary study
Published online: 17 September 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.27.05amb
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.27.05amb
Abstract
This chapter summarises research on how children avoid overgeneralizations of verb argument structure, focussing on the transitive-causative construction (e.g. *I’m dancing it [c.f. I’m making it dance]). It then presents some new data that bear on this issue: diary data of these types of utterances produced by the second author (from birth up until age 4;0), collected by the first author. These data are used to argue that, although errors from the point of view of the adult grammar, many of these utterances are in fact perfectly matched to the communicative needs of each situation; more so in fact than the corresponding adult forms would have been. For example, the utterances Can you jump me off?, Jump me!, Jump me down and Jump me up there do not mean ‘Do something that indirectly causes ME to instigate jumping’; the meaning implied by the periphrastic-causative construction (e.g., “Can you make me jump?”). Rather, the type of causation intended here is single-event, direct, external causation, of almost exactly the type that is typically conveyed by the transitive-causative construction (e.g., I broke a cup). The rather radical implication is that semantics must be represented not at the level of the verb but of individual events, necessitating an exemplar model under which (in principle) all witnessed utterances are stored along with some representation of the event to which they refer.
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