The Acquisition of Ergativity in Samoan

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.