2018 Friday Poster 6692
Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm
Telicity and Objecthood in the Acquisition of Unaccusativity: Mandarin-Speaking Children’s Interpretation of Manner-of-Motion Verbs
Y. Lu, T. Lee
Telicity is widely regarded as a crucial determinant of argument realization, given that event participants delimiting a telic event are typically projected as direct object (Hoekstra 1984; Levin 1987; Tenny 1987, 1994; Zaenen 1988, 1993; Hoekstra and Mulder 1990; Van Valin 1990; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995, 2005; van Hout 2004; Wagner 2006). The intimate relationship between telicity and objecthood has important implications for the subcategorization of one-place verbs, i.e. the split between object- taking unaccusatives and subject-taking unergatives. Mandarin Chinese always projects one-place telic verbs as unaccusatives, licensing them in the ‘V + le (perfective marker) + NP’ structure, a basic distributional diagnostic for unaccusativity in the language (Huang 1987, 2007; Yu 1995; Pan and Han 2005; Zeng 2007). This generalization holds irrespective of whether the verbs denote internally-caused events or events that can be externally caused. In contrast, one-place verbs denoting internally-caused atelic events fall into the unergative class.
The present study tests whether telicity as an aspectual trigger enables Mandarin-acquiring children to bootstrap into the unaccusative vs. unegative split in Chinese. We conducted two experiments examining how 4-year-old and 5-year-old children interpret the temporal structure of manner-of-motion verbs in the ‘NP + V + le’ (preverbal NP) and the ‘V +le + NP’ (postverbal NP) structures, using a video verification task. Experiment 1 included three dual-category manner-of-motion verbs (fei ‘fly away/fly’, pao ‘escape/run’ zou ‘leave/walk’), which can be unaccusative, denoting a change of state, or unergative, denoting an agentive activity. Experiment 2 included three manner-of-motion verbs which can only be unergative (pa ‘crawl’, you ‘swim’, tiao ‘jump’), denoting an atelic agentive motional process. The test items in the two experiments consisted of two trials per verb for each word order, with each item paired with a change-of-state (telic) scenario and a termination-of-activity (atelic) scenario (1)-(2), resulting in altogether 24 test items for each experiment. A between-subject design was adopted for both experiments, with a different group of subjects for each of the four conditions (2 word order x 2 age groups).
Findings from Experiment 1 show that for dual-category manner-of-motion verbs in the preverbal NP structure, children readily accepted both the change-of-state (telic) interpretation and the activity- termination (atelic) interpretation (82% and 69% respectively). At the same time, for the same verbs in the postverbal NP structure, they accepted the telic reading significantly more than the atelic reading (91% vs 39%) (Table 1) (Repeated-measures ANOVA: main effect of interpretation F(1, 28)=57.66, p<0.001), reflecting sensitivity to the link between telicity and objecthood. Results from Experiment 2 reveal that children draw a similar but less pronounced aspectual distinction for single-category unergative verbs in the postverbal NP structure (82% for change-of-state reading and 61% for activity-termination reading) (Table 2) (Repeated-measures ANOVA: main effect of interpretation F(1, 27)=10.61, p=0.003), even though the two readings are unattested in this structure.
Our overall experimental findings provide clear evidence for UG-regulated linkage between telicity and direct objecthood in children’s acquisition of unaccusativity.
References
[1] Huang, C.-T. James. 1987. Existential sentences in Chinese and (in)definiteness, In The Representation of (In)definiteness, eds., E. Reuland and A. terMeulen, 226-253. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. [2] Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2005. Argument Realization. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. [3] Tenny, Carol. 1994. Aspectual Roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer.