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The Acquisition of Ergativity in Samoan
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Item Summary
Title: | The Acquisition of Ergativity in Samoan |
Authors: | Muagututia, Grant |
Keywords: | linguistics |
Date Issued: | 01 Sep 2017 |
Publisher: | University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Department of Linguistics |
Citation: | Muagututia, Grant. 2017. The Acquisition of Ergativity in Samoan. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Working Papers in Linguistics 48(5). |
Series: | University of Hawai‘I at Mānoa Working Papers in Linguistics |
Abstract: | What little research there is on the acquisition of ergativity focuses on morphological ergativity (Ochs 1982; Bavin and Stoll 2013). This paper investigates the acquisition of ergativity in Samoan, which exhibits both morphological (case) and syntactic (relative clauses) ergativity. The results of two experiments (picture description; children, adolescents and adult controls) show that both morphological and syntactic ergativity is acquired rather late. Experiment 1 (case) revealed that children only produce the ergative case-marker 32% of the time. Remaining responses involved alternative strategies such as using an intransitive/control verb. Experiment 2 (relative clauses) revealed that in producing Object-relatives, children made errors 15% of the time, but produced the target form only 31% of the time. However, with (transitive) subject-relatives, accuracy exceeded 60%. Adolescents were adult-like in all respects. We conclude that morphological and syntactic ergativity is acquired by roughly age 8yrs. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10125/73267 |
Rights: | Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License |
Volume: | 2017 |
Appears in Collections: |
Working Papers in Linguistics - 2017 |
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