Learning Functional Prepositions
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Learning Functional Prepositions John Stewart Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1144 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] LEARNING FUNCTIONAL PREPOSITIONS by JOHN STEWART A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 ii 2015 JOHN STEWART Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Virginia Valian ___________________________________________ ___________________ ___________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Gita Martohardjono ___________________________________________ ___________________ ___________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Marcel Den Dikken ___________________________________________ Martin Chodorow ___________________________________________ Charles Yang ___________________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK - iii - Abstract LEARNING FUNCTIONAL PREPOSITIONS by John Stewart Adviser: Distinguished Professor Virginia Valian In first language acquisition, what does it mean for a grammatical category to have been acquired, and what are the mechanisms by which children learn functional categories in general? In the context of prepositions (Ps), if the lexical/functional divide cuts through the P category, as has been suggested in the theoretical literature, then constructivist accounts of language acquisition would predict that children develop adult-like competence with the more abstract units, functional Ps, at a slower rate compared to their acquisition of lexical Ps. Nativists instead assume that the features of functional P are made available by Universal Grammar (UG), and are mapped as quickly, if not faster, than the semantic features of their lexical counterparts. Conversely, if Ps are either all lexical or all functional, on both accounts of acquisition we should observe few differences in learning. Three empirical studies of the development of P were conducted via computer analysis of the English and Spanish sub-corpora of the CHILDES database. Study 1 analyzed errors in child usage of Ps, finding almost no errors in commission in either language, but that the English learners lag in their production of functional Ps relative to lexical Ps. That no such delay was found in the Spanish data suggests that the English pattern is not universal. Studies 2 and 3 applied novel measures of - iv - phrasal (P head + nominal complement) productivity to the data. Study 2 examined prepositional phrases (PPs) whose head-complement pairs appeared in both child and adult speech, while Study 3 considered PPs produced by children that never occurred in adult speech. In both studies the productivity of Ps for English children developed faster than that of lexical Ps. In Spanish there were few differences, suggesting that children had already mastered both orders of Ps early in acquisition. These empirical results suggest that at least in English P is indeed a split category, and that children acquire the syntax of the functional subset very quickly, committing almost no errors. The UG position is thus supported. Next, the dissertation explores a “soft nativist” acquisition strategy that composes the distributional analysis of input, minimal a priori knowledge of the possible co-occurrence of morphosyntactic features associated with functional elements, and linguistic knowledge that is presumably acquired via the experience of pragmatic, communicative situations. The output of the analysis consists in a mapping of morphemes to the feature bundles of nominative pronouns for English and Spanish, plus specific claims about the sort of knowledge required from experience. The acquisition model is then extended to adpositions, to examine what, if anything, distributional analysis can tell us about the functional sequences of PPs. The results confirm the theoretical position according to which spatiotemporal Ps are lexical in character, rooting their own extended projections, and that functional Ps express an aspectual sequence in the functional superstructure of the PP. - v - To the memory of my mothers, Julia and Joan, who valued education above all else. - vi - L'ho creata dal fondo di tutte le cose che mi sono più care, e non riesco a comprenderla. – Cesare Pavese, Incontro For if I know that ten is more than three, and then someone were to say: “No, on the contrary, three is more than ten, as is proved by my turning this stick into a snake” – and if he were to do just that and I were to to see him do it, I would not doubt my knowledge because of his feat. I would merely wonder how he could do such a thing. – Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error - vii - Acknowledgments I first met Virginia Valian when she gave a guest lecture on language acquisition during the introductory course of the Linguistics program. I was struck by the clarity of her exposition and the iron logic of her central argument – that a resolutely anti-nativist stance entails a universal claim, while soft nativism makes merely existential claims – and felt that, somehow, this really matters. She once told me that language acquisition, as an academic field, has everything in it: philosophy, psychology, language, statistics, sociology. Perhaps that is why I soon resolved to study acquisition, specifically, through large-scale corpus analysis, under Virginia's direction. This dissertation would never have come into being if it had not been for Virginia's intellectual guidance, her encouragement, her unvarnished and quite direct critique, and I dare say the stoic patience she exhibited faced with the vagaries of a part-time student. It is with the deepest gratitude that I thank her. Marcel Den Dikken co-taught that first course, and I soon came to appreciate his humor and the thoroughness of his instruction. Those years of Syntax I and II, morphology, and the advanced syntax seminars, have in retrospect an almost orpheic quality for which I feel pointed nostalgia. Marcel took us on a voyage into the bowels of the language system itself, and it was wonderful. Throughout, his positive, funny, supportive attitude helped us when faced with the inevitable moments of self-doubt and exhaustion. Marcel is a terrific teacher and I will always feel very grateful for what I learned from him. His thorough and helpful comments to dissertation drafts, as well as his positive feedback, were invaluable in propelling the work forward. I am grateful to Martin Chodorow for his course in statistical natural language processing, through - viii - which I acquired, and gained confidence in using, the skills required for large-scale corpus analysis; for heading up the committee for my second qualifier; and of course for his contributions to this dissertation, from the earliest ideational stages, which imprinted the final form of the statistical analyses and the computational model. Special thanks must go also to Charles Yang for agreeing to act as an external reader and for participating in the doctoral defense. I have long admired his work from afar and feel honored by his attention. I would like to thank Bill McClure for pinch-hitting for my second qualifier and for the terrific semantics course sequence. My gratitude extends to the other Linguistics faculty members whose courses I took, Ricardo Otheguy and Diane Bradley, and also downstairs to the Education Psychology program, where I expended nine credits on crucial courses in statistics taught by Jay Verkuilen and David Rindskopf. I owe unpayable debts to Gita Martohardjono, for enabling me to switch from the MA to the doctoral program, and for smoothing out the many collisions between life's knots and those of the institution. Also of course to Nishi Bissoondial for her guidance through all key institutional transitions. Above all, it is to my wife, Laura Kraber, that I owe everything – not just this work, but my life itself. By shouldering more than a single human should, Laura gave the gift of time, without which none of this could have unfolded. I pray I can prove my love in return. - ix - Table of Contents Abstract.................................................................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................................vii Introduction...........................................................................................................................................................1 Leibniz, Empiricism, and Prepositions..................................................................................................1 Summary of the Argument......................................................................................................................7