Splitting the notion of 'agent': case-marking in early child Hindi
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PB 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. bhuvana@mpi.nl
Abstract:
Two construals of agency are evaluated as possible innate biases guiding case-marking in children. A BROAD construal treats agentive arguments of multi-participant and single-participant events as being similar. A NARROWER construal is restricted to agents of multi-participant events. In Hindi, ergative case-marking is associated with agentive participants of multi-participant, perfective actions. Children relying on a broad or narrow construal of agent are predicted to overextend ergative case-marking to agentive participants of transitive imperfective actions and/or intransitive actions. Longitudinal data from three children acquiring Hindi (1;7 to 3;9) reveal no overextension errors, suggesting early sensitivity to distributional patterns in the input.
Related Concept Videos
Directional Terms
Masking and Demasking Agents
There are many masking agents, such as cyanide, fluoride, triethanolamine, thiourea, and 2,3-bis(sulfanyl)propan-1-ol (formerly 2,3-dimercapto-1-propanol), with the masking agent chosen based on the metal...
Language
Corballis and Suddendorf (2007) and Tomasello and Rakoczy (2003) highlight the role of language in...
Components of Language
Language Development
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
Language and Cognition


