The emergence of syntax: The acquisition of transitivity.

Abstract

This thesis examines the hypothesis that children attend to and encode events of cardinal transitivity in their early utterances. It is argued that Hopper and Thompson's 1980 parameters of cardinal transitivity can lead to a clear and concise description of what kinds of events allow children to "bootstrap" their way into syntax. A transitivity grid is developed, based on research in infant and child perception and cognition, by which utterances can be rated in terms of cardinal transitivity. This grid is applied to selected verbs in a corpus taken from a diary study. It is shown, based on the analysis of the data, that this hypothesis cannot be disproved. The knowledge the child can be assumed to have to generate the utterances he does is represented formally in terms of Conceptual Semantics, which is shown to be a promising theory in accounting for children's early acquisition of semantic and syntactic knowledge.