The Acquisition of Lexical Categories

1
The Acquisition of Lexical Categories
Marian Erkelens
2
Bootstrap of this project

• Acquisition of word meaning
• Relation between semantics and syntax what
  serves as a bootstrap to what (Pinker, 1984
  Gleitman, 1990)?

3
General Issues

• The nature of lexical categories.
• The typology of lexical categories in combination
  with the acquisition of lexical categories

4
Research questions (Issue I)

• What is the nature of categorial information of
  content words?
• How do children acquire the categories of content
  words?

5
Research questions (Issue II)

• 3. How do languages typologically differ in the
  organization of lexical categories?
• 4. Do children learning typologically different
  languages follow different acquisitional
  patterns?

6
Outline

• Results in answer to the questions concerning the
  first issue
• What is the nature of categorial information of
  content words?
• How do children acquire the categories of content
  words?
• Short introduction to future research concerning
  the second issue the typology and the
  acquisition of lexical categories.

7
What is the nature of categorial information of
content words?

• Generative approaches
• Traditionally
• categorial information is stored in the lexicon
  (Lieber, 1981)
• Distributed Morphology
• categorial information is attached to a word by
  the syntax (Marantz, 1997)

8
What is the nature of categorial information of
content words?

• Functional approach (Hengeveld et al, f.c.)

Hierarchy of syntactic functions Head lt Head
lt Modifier lt Modifier PredPhr RefPhr RefPhr PredPh
r
Hierarchy of related parts-of-speech
V lt N lt A lt MAdv
9
How do children acquire the categories of content
words?

• Expectations from theory
• Children learn words including their category.
  Category acquisition is part of lexical
  development (Lieber).

• Children learn words independent of their
  category. Category acquisition is part of
  syntactic or language-specific development
• (Marantz / Hengeveld).

10
How do children acquire the categories of content
words?

• Empirical data first words
• First words are predominantly nouns (Gentner,
  1982), although debated (Choi Gopnik, 1995
  Tardif, 1996)
• But do these words have a category at all? Or
  does category come in with syntactic I- and
  D-marking (Van Kampen, f.c.)?

11
How do children acquire the categories of content
words?

• Empirical data later stages English
• I sharped them A V
• Im sanding N V
• Are they silling? A V

12
How do children acquire the categories of content
words?

• Empirical data later stages Dutch
• Jij wil altijd luiwen
• you want always lazy-INF
• You always want to lazy A V
• Het zandt hier
• it sand-3SG here
• It sands here N V

13
How do children acquire the categories of content
words?

• Empirical data later stages Mandarin
• Na shi wo de qi chuang
• this be my POS rise bed
• This is my getting-up from bed V N
• Mei you hong ta de jiao
• not have red her POS feet
• (we) havent reddened her feet A V

14
How do children acquire the categories of content
words?

• Implications
• Recent literature (Marantz, 1997 Van Kampen,
  f.c.) suggests children might start with
  category-less words.
• Initial data from Dutch and Mandarin children of
  errors in categorization support these ideas.

15
How do children acquire the categories of content
words?

• Next step
• Assuming that children start with an initial,
  category-less or uni-categorial stage in lexical
  acquisition
• How then, do they acquire in later stages the
  categorial system of their mother tongue?

16
Typological differences (II) 1
17
Do children learning typologically different
languages follow different acquisitional
patterns?

• Future research...

18
References

• Choi, S., Gopnik, A. (1995). Early Acquisition
  of Verbs in Korean A Cross-Linguistic Study.
  Journal of Child Language, 22(3), 497-529.
• Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before
  verbs linguistic relativity versus natural
  partitioning. In S. A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language
  development (pp. 301-334). Hillsdale, N.J.
  Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Gleitman, L. (1990). The Structural Sources of
  Verb Meanings. Language Acquisition, 1(1), 3-55.
• Hengeveld, K., Rijkhoff, J., Siewierska, A.
  (f.c.). Parts-of-speech systems and word order.
  To appear in Journal of Linguistics, 41(1).
• Kampen, J. v. (1997). First Steps in Wh-movement.
  Delft EburonPL.
• Kampen, J. v. (f.c.). Language specific
  bootstraps for UG categories.
• Lieber, R. (1981). On the organization of the
  lexicon. Bloomington (Ind.) Indiana University
  Linguistics Club.
• Marantz, A. (1997). No Escape from Syntax Don't
  Try Morphological Analysis in the Privacy of Your
  Own Lexicon. University of Pennsylvania Working
  Papers in Linguistics (UPWPL), 4(2), 201-225.
• Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and
  language development. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard
  University Press.
• Tardif, T. (1996). Nouns are not always learned
  before verbs evidence from Mandarin speakers'
  early vocabularies. Developmental Psychology,
  32(3), 492-504.