Child acquisition of dative shift General observations Findings have shown that by age three children demonstrate an understanding of dative shift alternation. When presented with both alternations using novel
verbs, children are more likely to shift the DOC form into the oblique dative form. For example, children were presented with novel verbs in both the double object construction and oblique dative forms: :(9) "You pilked Petey the cup" (DOC) :(10) "You gorped the keys to Toby" (oblique dative) After hearing these two forms and then being asked to produce a corresponding alternation for one of the two, children were more likely to produce the oblique dative (11) than the double object construction (12). :(11) "I pilked the cup to Petey" (oblique dative) :(12) "I gorped Toby the keys" (DOC). When children say ungrammatical sentences, they are not often corrected. How, then, do children avoid overgeneralizations such as the one above? There are two main hypotheses which try and explain how children avoid overgeneralizations, the "conservatism" hypothesis and the "criteria" hypothesis. The "conservatism" hypothesis proposes that children do not overgeneralize the double object construction to verbs such as [donate] and [whisper] (ex. [John whispers Mary the secret]), because the child never hears ungrammatical double object constructions in their input. The child only recreates forms they hear in their input and therefore does not generalize the double object construction. Therefore, this hypothesis predicts that children acquire dative shift rules verb-by-verb, not by generalization. The "criteria" hypothesis instead proposes that children learn to constrain their rule for dative shift and are able to apply it only to monosyllabic verbs (one-syllable verbs, ex. [give]), which indicate possession changes (ex. [Mary gave John the ball], where [give] denotes a possession change from Mary, to John). In other words, children are quite productive with their speech, applying dative shift to many verbs, but are constrained by
morphophonological criteria (
monosyllabic vs.
polysyllabic verbs), and
semantic criteria (possession change).
Forming a new hypothesis Gropen et al. (1989) investigated these two hypotheses. According to these theorists, a strict "conservatism hypothesis" is false because children in their studies did not only use the double-object construction with
verbs they had previously heard in that alternation. However, the theorists proposed a "weak conservatism hypothesis" (a less strict version of the "conservatism hypothesis") on the basis that children used verbs more often than not in the alternation they had heard them used in. With regards to the "criteria hypothesis", evidence shows that children do indeed have criteria-governed productivity, but only in a very general way. A new hypothesis was proposed to account for everything the original hypotheses could not by combining the "weak conservatism hypothesis", the "criteria hypothesis", and lexical information. The main idea presented is that speakers acquire a "dative rule" that operates on two levels: the "broad range" and the "narrow range" levels. On the "broad-range level" the rule applies
semantically and lexically, or "lexicosemantically". In this account, the
syntactic change and
semantic constraints of the dative rule are consequences of a single operation, namely the lexicosemantic shift. That is, if a verb beginning in the "X causes Y to go to Z" structure can alternate with the "X causes Z to have Y" structure and the sentence remains well-formed, then the child realizes that this verb can undergo dative shift. Figure 4, to the right, illustrates the alternation process. Verbs that undergo the "dative shift" rule must also be specified by a
possessor-possession relationship. Verbs whose meanings are not cognitively compatible with the notion of a possession change will not produce a coherent semantic structure in the double object construction. The constraints characterized by this broad-range level form as a combination of children's
lexical,
semantic, and
syntactic structural innate knowledge, in addition to the frequency of these forms in their input. On the "narrow-range level" the dative rule constricts the broad-level rule, allowing it only to apply to subclasses of semantically and morphologically similar verbs. Narrow-range rules may be acquired by a procedure that is weakly conservative, in that the only verbs that the child allows to undergo dative shift freely are those verbs that they have actually heard undergo an alternation, or verbs that are semantically similar to them. The narrow subclasses of verbs are simply the set of verbs that are similar to a verb the child has heard to alternate. ‘Semantic similarity" would be defined as verbs that share most or all of their grammatically relevant semantic structure. For example, the notions of
go, be, have, or
act, as well as kinds of causal relations such as
cause, let, and prevent, including the verbs
throw and kick, all share the same general semantic structure of
cause. The final constraint of this proposed hypothesis is the
morphophonological constraint. It is proposed that children will apply the morphophonological constraint to subclasses of alternating verbs that are
all from the native class (monosyllabic). If the set of alternating verbs are not all from the native class, then the child will
not apply the morphophonological constraint. This account correctly predicts that the morphophonological constraint could apply to some semantic subclasses, but not others. For example, children would apply the constraint to the following five subclasses of alternating verbs: Children would not apply the constraint to the class of "future having" verbs because they are not all from the native (monosyllabic) class, thereby allowing the following DOC examples to be well-formed: :(15) John
assigned/allotted/guaranteed/bequeathed Mary four tickets. == Examples ==