The Acquisition of English Dative Constructions

Applied Psycholinguistics 22 (2001), 253–267 Printed in the United States of America The acquisition of English dative constructions AIMEE L. CAMPBELL Emory University MICHAEL TOMASELLO Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Inselstrasse 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT We analyzed the three main types of English dative constructions – the double-object dative, the to dative, and the for dative – in the spontaneous speech of seven children from the age of 1;6 to 5;0. The main findings were as follows. First, the double-object dative was acquired by most of the children before either of the prepositional datives; this was attributed to the greater frequency with which children heard this construction with individual verbs. Second, the verbs children used with these constructions were not only the adult prototypical ones, but also a number of the less prototypical ones; again, this was very likely due to their frequency and saliency in the language children heard. Third, no support was found for Ninio’s (1999) analysis of the emergence of constructions in terms of a single “pathbreaking” verb; rather, children began using the double-object dative with many different verbs and did not follow the trajectory proposed by Ninio (i.e., a single verb is used for some months before an “explosion” of new verbs is introduced in the construction). Finally, most of the verbs initially used in the three dative constructions were first used in other constructions (e.g., a simple transitive); this was even true for some obligatory datives, such as give and show. The current results provide a starting point for determining the underlying representations for the different kinds of dative constructions and for explicating how children understand the interrelations among these and other constructions. All languages of the world have grammatical constructions for expressing the transfer of objects (and other things) between people (Newman, 1996). In English, a constellation of three related constructions is responsible for doing this: the to dative, the for dative (or benefactive), and the double-object dative (or ditransitive). These English constructions are interesting from a developmental point of view for several reasons: (a) each refers to a salient semantic situation for children and so is acquired relatively early; (b) each is relatively coherent semantically in that it is always used for some kind of transfer between people (either literal or metaphorical); and (c) each is cognitively 2001 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/01 $9.50 Applied Psycholinguistics 22:2 254 Campbell & Tomasello: Acquisition of English dative constructions complex in that it involves three participants (donor, recipient, gift) (Dixon, 1991). Although virtually all accounts of children’s early acquisition of English note the existence of these constructions, few studies have directly examined them. One exception is a study by Snyder and Stomswold (1997) in the UG frame- work; the authors used children’s acquisition of the dative constructions as part of an argument about parameter setting in language acquisition. Specifically, they argued from UG analyses, presenting some suggestive evidence, that children should always acquire the double-object dative before they acquire the other two constructions. Another exception is a study by Osgood and Zehler (1981); here, the authors provided evidence that children understand prototypical instantiations of these constructions (in which two human participants ex- change an inanimate entity) before they understand less prototypical uses. Fi- nally, Tomasello (1998) gave a descriptive account of one child’s use of expressions of possession; he found that dative constructions were among the earliest constructions to emerge. In addition, a number of proposals have been made about the relation between children’s grasp of verb meanings and constructions in general, often granting a prominent role to the dative constructions. First, Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, Goldberg, and Wilson (1989) studied children’s acquisition of the dative alterna- tion (i.e., their ability to identify verbs that do and do not participate in both double-object dative and to dative constructions). The basic question involved children’s identification of the verb classes that do and do not alternate; this was part of a larger set of questions about the relation between verbs and constructions in general (e.g., Pinker, 1989). Second, Goldberg and Sethuraman (n.d.) argued that all of the most basic verb-argument constructions of English have one or more basic verbs – usually a “light” verb – as their central sense. In the case of the dative constructions, this verb is give. They provided some evidence that many children learn their first dative construction with give. Fi- nally, Ninio (1999) presented a related argument that children acquire their earliest constructions on the basis of one or two “pathbreaking” verbs (again, usually a light verb), which pave the way for the acquisition of other verbs for use in that construction. Although Ninio did not address the dative constructions in particular, her proposals are relevant here, as these constructions form a very distinctive group. This article presents the results of a corpus study of seven children from the CHILDES database. The purpose of the study was to document the manner in which children acquired their earliest to dative, for dative, and double-object dative constructions. The following questions were posed. First, which of the three constructions did children use first? Second, which verbs were used (and which of these were used first) in the three constructions? Third, did the verbs used first in these constructions have a prior history of use in other constructions? Finally, what was the role of child-directed speech in the acquisition of dative constructions? In answering these questions we hoped to provide insight not only into children’s acquisition of these particular constructions, but also into the general processes of language acquisition – especially with regard to the relation between verbs and constructions. Applied Psycholinguistics 22:2 255 Campbell & Tomasello: Acquisition of English dative constructions METHOD Data Participants consisted of seven children from the CHILDES database (Mac- Whinney, 1995). These children were chosen to represent a large span of early language development during the preschool years. Included in the study were all the transcripts for Eve, from ages 1;6 to 2;3 (Brown, 1973); Adam, from ages 2;3.4 to 4;10.23 (Brown, 1973); Sarah, from ages 2;3.5 to 5;1.6 (Brown, 1973); Peter, from ages 1;9.7 to 3;1.21 (Bloom, 1970); Abe, from ages 2;4.24 to 5;0.11 (Kuczaj, 1976); Naomi, from ages 1;2.29 to 4;9.3 (Sachs, 1983); and Nina, from ages 1;11.16 to 3;3.21 (Suppes, 1974). Analytic procedure All transcripts were initially searched by hand, as a part of a larger study of the development of early verb-argument constructions. As a part of this process, all utterances identified as to datives, for datives, or double-object datives were collated. In all cases, the utterance in question had to have two postverbal argu- ments and had to convey some kind of transfer of objects or information (e.g., telling people secrets, reading books to children, and making things for people). In double-object datives, the recipient appeared postverbally before the gift (as in X gives Y the Z). In to datives, the gift appeared before the recipient, which was marked by either to (as in X gives the Z to Y) or a schwa. In for datives, the gift also appeared before the recipient, which was marked by for (as in X makes the Z for Y). For purposes of the present study, the authors analyzed and tabulated these utterances as needed for each of the specific research questions. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The results address three main questions. First, what was the order of first uses of the three different dative construction types? Second, which verbs were used in these constructions? Third, when were the very earliest uses of these constructions and verbs? First uses of the constructions Snyder and Stomswold (1997) claimed that all of the children in their sample (some of whom overlap with the current sample) learned double-object datives before to datives. This generalization has some truth to it, but the situation is actually more complex than this if we look at both individual children and their individual verbs. First of all, there was a large range in the age of acquisition for the constructions. Eve produced her first construction when she was only 18 months of age, whereas Sarah was 33 months of age when she initially used a dative. The other five children began producing constructions somewhere in between these two ages. Although the age of initial production showed large variance among the children, patterns in the order of acquisition were apparent. As can be seen in Table 1, five of the seven children produced double-object Applied Psycholinguistics 22:2 256 Campbell & Tomasello: Acquisition of English dative constructions Table 1. Age of first use of the three dative constructions for the seven children Double-object datives To datives For datives Eve 1;6a 1;10 1;11 Nina 1;11.29a 2;0.17 2;1.15 Peter 2;1.21 2;0.7a 2;1.21 Naomi 2;1.7a 2;5.3 2;3.19 Adam 2;3.4a 2;11.13 2;10.30 Abe 2;6.14 2;6.18 2;5.20a Sarah 2;9.29a 3;2.23 3;0.18 aIndicates the first construction type used by the child. datives before either to datives or for datives.

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