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The mosaic acquisition of grammatical relations
1University of Kansas, Kansas City.
Journal of Child Language
|October 1, 1991
Summary
Children acquire diverse grammatical relations by understanding semantic and pragmatic structures, rather than fixed subject-object roles. Languages with independent distinctions are easier to learn.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Language Acquisition
Background:
- Traditional grammar views struggle to explain the diversity of acquirable grammatical relations.
- Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) decomposes grammatical relations into logical (semantic) and information (pragmatic) structures.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine the acquisition of grammatical relations within the Role and Reference Grammar framework.
- To compare grammatical relation acquisition across four diverse languages: Turkish, Kaluli, Hungarian, and Italian.
Main Methods:
- Comparative analysis of grammatical structures across Turkish, Kaluli, Hungarian, and Italian.
- Focus on how semantic and pragmatic structures influence the acquisition of grammatical relations.
Main Results:
- Two main difficulties identified: neutralization of distinctions by interfering structures (Kaluli, Italian) and global case marking requiring semantic discovery (Hungarian, Kaluli).
- Structures encoding semantic or pragmatic distinctions independently (e.g., Turkish) are acquired more easily.
Conclusions:
- Children acquire grammatical relations by integrating semantic and pragmatic information, not just fixed roles.
- Language acquisition involves piecing together discrete structures, enabling the learning of diverse grammatical relations.