The acquisition of Spanish passives: The Comparison Between Subject Experiencer Versus Actional Verbs and Direct Aspectual Semantic Evidence for the Adjectival Interpretation
Jesús Oliva | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas | Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT
Ken Wexler | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas | Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT
We test the maturational/adjectival analysis theory of development of passives in Spanish. Children perform less well on psychological passives than on actional passives. Since Borer and Wexler (1987), the most prominent hypothesis is that this difference is due to children’s use of an adjectival interpretation of passives. Spanish passives are aux + participle, with different auxiliaries for verbal/adjectival. In Experiment 1, children perform better on actional than on psychological passives. Experiment 2, using the method of Gavarró and Parramon (2017), tests the eventive/stative interpretation of passives directly. As predicted, children often recover an incorrect stative interpretation for verbal passives. Strikingly, the non-commonsensical prediction of the theory that there is a negative correlation between adult-like performance in the theta-role and aspect experiments is confirmed.
Alexiadou, A., Gehrke, B., & Schafer, F. (2014). The argument structure of adjectival participles revisited. Lingua, 149, 118–138.
Babyonyshev, M., Ganger, J., Pesetsky, D., & Wexler, K. (2001). The maturation of grammatical principles: Evidence from Russian unaccusatives. Linguistic Inquiry, 32(1), 1–44.
Babyonyshev, M., & Brun, D. (2003). The role of aspect in the acquisition of passive constructions in Russian. Paper presented at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, GALA, 2003
Bever, T. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 279–362). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
Borer, H., & Wexler, K. (1987). The maturation of syntax. In T. Roeper and E. Williams (Eds.), Parameter setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Chomsky, N. (2001). Derivation by phase. In M. Kenstowicz (Ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language (pp. 1–52). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Fox, D., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1998). Children’s passive: A view from the by-phrase. Linguistic Inquiry, 29, 311–322.
Gavarró, A., & Parramon, X. (2017). On the adjectival interpretation of passives in acquisition. Lingua, 185, 11–24.
Gavarró, A., Parramon, X., & Rallo, L. (2013). The by-phrase and the acquisition of Majorcan Catalan passives. In S. Stavrakaki, M. Lalioti & P. Konstantinopoulou( Eds.), Advances in Language Acquisition (pp.81–89). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Gordon, P., & Chafetz, J. (1990). Verb-based versus class-based accounts of actionality effects in children’s comprehension of passives. Cognition, 36, 227–254.
Gutiérrez-Rexach, J. (2017). Review of New Perspectives on the Study of Ser and Estar. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 16(1), 1–5.
Hirsch, C., & Hartman, J. (2006). Some (wh-) questions concerning passive interactions. In A. Belletti, E. Bennatti, C. Chesi, E. di Domenico, & I. Ferrari (Eds.), Proceedings of the Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Hirsch, C., & Wexler, K. (2006a). Children’s passives and their resulting interpretation. In K. Deen, J. Nomura, B. Schulz, & B. Schwartz (Eds.),
The Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition–North America, University of Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 4
, 125–136.
Hirsch, C., & Wexler, K. (2006b). By the way, children don’t know by. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.),
BUCLD 30: Proceedings of the 30th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development
(pp. 249–261). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Israel, M., Johnson, C., & Brooks, P. J. (2000). From states to events: The acquisition of English passive participles. Cognitive Linguistics, 11(1/2), 103–129.
Kratzer, A. (2000). Building Statives. Talk presented at the Berkeley Linguistic Society 26, February 2000.
Leonetti, M., Pérez-Jiménez, I., & Gumiel-Molina, S. (2015). Ser and estar: Outstanding questions. In I. Pérez-Jiménez, M. Leonetti, & S. Gumiel-Molina (Eds.), New perspectives on the study of ser and estar (pp. 1–20). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Maratsos, M., Fox, D., Becker, J., & Chalkey, M. (1985). Semantic restrictions on children’s passives. Cognition, 19, 167–191.
Meltzer-Asscher, A. (2011). Adjectival passives in Hebrew: Evidence for parallelism between adjectival and verbal systems. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 29, 815–855.
Mendikoetxea, A. (1999). Construcciones inacusativas y pasivas. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 2, pp. 1575–1629). Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Pérez-Jiménez, I., Leonetti, M., & Gumiel-Molina, S. (Eds.) (2015). New perspectives on the study of ser and estar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Pierce, A. (1992). The acquisition of passives in Spanish and the question of a-chain maturation. Language Acquisition, 2(1), 55–81.
Roby, D. B. (2007). Aspect and the categorization of states: The case of ser and estar in Spanish. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation) University of Texas at Austin.
Schmitt, C. (1992). Ser and estar: A matter of aspect.
Proceedings of the Northeastern Linguistic Society, 22
, 411–426
Sugisaki, K. (1998). Japanese passives in acquisition. UCONN Working Papers in Linguistics, 10, 145–156.
Terzi, A., & Wexler, K. (2002). A-chains and s-homophones in children’s grammar: Evidence from Greek passives. In
Proceedings of the Northeastern Linguistic Society, 3
, 519–537.
Wexler, K. (2004). Theory of phasal development: Perfection in child grammar. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 48, 159–209.
Zagona, K. (2012). Ser and estar: Phrase structure and aspect. In Building a bridge between linguistic communities of the Old and the New World. Leiden: Brill. <
>
Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
Agostinho, Celina, Anna Gavarró & Ana Lúcia Santos
2024. The acquisition of the verbal passive: The role of verb type. Language Acquisition► pp. 1 ff.
Albedaiwi, Bayan & Yasser Albaty
2024. Children’s Acquisition of Passive Constructions in Najdi Arabic. PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 35:1 ► pp. 58 ff.
Fryer, Maude, F. Neveu, S. Prévost, A. Montébran, A. Steuckardt, G. Bergounioux, G. Merminod & G. Philippe
2024. Effet du type de verbe et du complément en par sur l’acquisition du passif en français. SHS Web of Conferences 191 ► pp. 10002 ff.
Aravind, Athulya & Loes Koring
2023. Experiencer troubles: A reappraisal of the predicate-based asymmetry in child passives. Language Acquisition 30:1 ► pp. 76 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.