2018 Friday Poster 6638

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Recursion follows productivity, not vice versa: The case of Spanish NP recursion
A. Pérez-Leroux, A. Castilla-Earls, M. Lara Díaz, E. Pettibone

Background. The input for recursion (i.e., unbounded self-same embedding of phrases) is a fundamental linguistic property, but one that children have to learn, given language diversity.1,2,3 Even a single language family, Indoeuropean attests great diachronic and typological variation in determiner phrase (DP) recursion; recursive forms become productive and disappear in short timespans. As some forms of PP recursion become restricted, other forms’ use increases.4 How does productivity of an embedding strategy impact acquisition of recursion, relative to direct exposure (ex.1)?

We consider data from Spanish, which has two unrestricted strategies for embedding NPs within NPs (the minimal linker de, and relative clauses (RCs)). Prepositional modifiers are mostly limited to the comitatives with/without in inalienable contexts. Spatial prepositions are largely blocked.5,6 In Spanish, Modified NPs are rare in parental speech and recursive modification is nearly absent: the entire Juan/Linaza corpus and Maria’s corpus in the 3;0-3;6 period contain 3 instance of recursive modification each.7,8,9

Given the sparsity of the input and limited productivity of PP modifier in Spanish, we ask:

  • Do children overgeneralize PPs from predicate to modifier position? According to Yang10 generalization within positive evidence can guarantee convergence if constrained by a formal notion of
  • Is productivity of a specific lexical preposition a precursor for recursion at the level of the individual speaker? (i.e., are speakers who use a PP recursively the same who frequently use it once?)
  • Does productivity of Spanish de extends from the possessive to relational contexts. We compare Spanish to existing English data: where recursion of relational of is the least productive and latest to emerge; This is expected, since of competes with other strategies including compounding and genitives (tomato can/can of tomatoes, the crown of the king/the king’s crown), whereas in Spanish, de consistently expresses these

Methods. We elicited 4 types of recursive DPs (possessives, locatives, comitatives and relational modifiers), using a referential elicitation task. A story+picture scenario introduced the relevant vocabulary items; a subsequent picture prompted recursively modified DPs (Fig.1). Participants were 22 adults and 88 children (aged 4-6) from Bogotá, Colombia. Children also completed memory and language tests (K-BIT, CELF, TVIP).

Results. The results support the link from productivity to recursion. At the first level of modification (Tab.1), de and RCs are the common linkers: other prepositional lexemes are limited beyond expectations. At level 2, children preferently start by using recursive de (Fig.2). The speakers who used PP recursion (5 adults and 3 children) were those who produced the most PPs as one-level modifiers. The preference for de does not extend to other contexts: a glmer analysis identifies  significant  differences  between  adults  and  children  (bb=-3.103,p<.001),   and  between conditions (POSS>COM(bb=-.771,p=.013)>LOC(bb=-.792,p=.011)>REL(bb=-2.046,p<.001); the interaction GROUPCHILD:CONDITIONB is significant (bb=1.009,p=.003). Children do not extend recursive de to relational contexts. Recursive input is rare enough as to be unlikely to play an essential role in acquisition; this is a clear case of constrained rule generalization. Our data suggests modeling productivity should include a role for lexical-conceptual classes in constraining the scope of a formal rule.

References

1Hauser et al. 2002 The faculty of language Science; 2Evans & Levinson 2009 The myth of language universals BBS; 3Roeper & Snyder 2005 Language learnability and the form of recursion; 4Widmer et al. 2018 NP recursion over time, Language; 5Moreira Rodriguez 2006 The book on the table, Bulletin of Spanish Studies; 6Picallo 2014; 7Linaza et al, Lenguaje, comunicación y comprensión, Infancia Y Aprendizaje; 8López-Ornat 1994. La adquisición de la lengua española, 9Pettibone (in prep); 10Yang 2016 Price of Productivity.