Children Learn Causatives Despite Pervasive Ellipsis: Evidence from Turkish

In this study, we explore how children learn causatives from the language they are exposed to in their everyday lives. Previous research has argued that argument structure is a crucial facilitator for learning causatives. Here, we examine the role of argument structure in the acquisition of morphological and lexical causatives. We use Turkish as a test case which allows argument ellipsis and ask whether reliable argument expression is a key factor in learning causatives. We use longitudinal data of 7 children spanning from 8 to 36 months of age and their surrounding environment. We show that ellipsis in child-directed speech is pervasive for both lexical and morphological causatives. However, such pervasive ellipsis does not seem to influence the acquisition process. This suggests that argument structure may not play a major role in the learning of causatives in a natural learning environment.