CAPITULO II MARCO TEÓRICO
ESCALA DE VALORACIÓN 1 Totalmente en desacuerdo
Of all the types of A-movement, the passive has been the most extensively studied in first language acquisition. As Keenan (1985) implies, the passive is a marked construction
in many adult languages; correspondingly, much of the initial research indicated that the passive was also late to be acquired. Naturalistic data from English (Horgan, 1978), French (Sinclair, Sinclair, and Marcellue, 1971; cited inSuzman,1985), German (Mills,
1985), and Hebrew (Berman,1985) has indicated that spontaneous full passives (that is, those with a by-phrase) are quite rare in child language until 4;0 at the very earliest (English, German), if not much later (e.g., 8;0 in Hebrew).
This relatively late acquisition prompted Borer and Wexler (1987, 1992)17 to propose the linguistic maturation hypothesis;18 according to this hypothesis, certain linguistic constructions in UG (including those involving A-chains, such as the passive) are not immediately available to the child, but rather mature over time, just as do secondary sex characteristics. Structures relevant to the passive are assumed to mature around the age of 4;0; before this age, the A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH) posits that A-chains are ungrammatical for the child, and predicts that passives will therefore not appear in spontaneous speech. Data from a number of other studies, including experimental ones, have also been interpreted by various researchers as support for the maturation hypothesis (e.g., Horgan, 1978; Mills, 1985; Pierce,1992a).
However, other researchers have suggested alternative accounts for the data which do not appeal to linguistic maturation. Specifically, a number of authors have proposed that naturalistic data may have been incorrectly interpreted. For instance, several au- thors (e.g.,Crain and Fodor,1993;Pinker et al.,1987) have pointed out that the corresponding scarcity of full passives in naturalistic adult speech is never interpreted as
17The earlier of these two papers (
Borer and Wexler, 1987) proposes that pre-mature children have trouble forming A-chains of any kind. However, the widely acceptedVP-internal subject hypothesis
(among others, Koopman and Sportiche, 1991) – according to which all subjects are generated in [Spec, VP] and then raise to [Spec, TP], forming an A-chain – proved problematic for this formulation of Borer and Wexler’s idea, since children seem to have no trouble with this type of subject raising (see also Fox and Grodzinsky, 1998; K¨oppe,1994). Borer and Wexler (1992) relax their approach by claiming that the only problematic A-chains are those relating two potentialθ-positions. These are the so-called “(subject, object)” (Babyonyshev et al.,2001) or “nontrivial” (Chomsky,1995;Guasti, 2002) A-chains.
18This approach contrasts most noticeably with thecontinuity hypothesisof
a lack of grammatical knowledge, but instead as evidence that the passive is a marked construction. Furthermore, some experimental studies indicating late access to passives have suffered from methodological flaws.
Crain and Fodor(1993) suggest that in many cases, the actual cause for chil- dren’s errors on experimental tasks is not a lack of linguistic maturity but rather the result of nonlinguistic cognitive demands, including sentence parsing, the planning of responses, and pragmatic presuppositions. Thisnonlinguistic maturation hypothesis pro- poses that experimental linguistic performance improves over time due to the maturation of these other cognitive abilities. Indeed, results from a number of other experiments have indicated at least partial, if not full, mastery of the passive by children younger than age 4. These results come from experimental designs that minimize nonlinguistic cognitive demands, provide felicitous pragmatic contexts for use of the passive, or even examine a language with a passive distinct in its characteristics from the English construction.
For instance,Borer and Wexler(1987) had specifically claimed that any pas- sives which did appear in English-acquiring children’s speech at this young age were not verbal (syntactic) passives, as described above, but instead adjectival (lexical) passives; the two are homophonous in English, but the latter involve no A-chain. Grimm (1973; cited in Mills, 1985) found evidence that seemed to support this proposal. Although German verbal passives differ from adjectival passives in their choice of auxiliary (i.e.,
werden vs. sein, respectively) and are thus not entirely homophonous, Grimm found that a common error in a repetition experiment was to replace werden with sein, which suggests that children perceive the two as similar, if not identical; this could be taken as support for Borer and Wexler’s adjectival-passive hypothesis. However, Demuth (1989) reports acquisition of the passive by age 2;8 in Sesotho, a Bantu language in the Niger-Congo language family, which has verbal but no adjectival passive. Moreover,
Eisenbeiss(1993) reports for German that in a picture identification task, children ages 2;0 and older chose the correct picture 90% of the time for verbal passives, and there
was even a strong tendency (70%) for 2-year-olds to incorrectly interpret adjectival pas- sives as verbal passives. Likewise, in an elicited production task, even children younger than 4 produced verbal passives. In light of these facts, it seems unlikely that all early passives are lexical rather than syntactic, and it may prove that experimental design is to blame for the discrepancy between Eisenbeiss’s study and earlier claims about late acquisition of the passive in German. For instance, a sentence-imitation task like that used by Grimm may introduce non-linguistic cognitive demands of the sort discussed by Crain and Fodor, while a picture-identification task reduces the cognitive load. In short, extra cognitive demands may in the past have masked German-speaking children’s true linguistic competence. Eisenbeiss’s data, however, does indicate that the distinction be- tweensein andwerdenpassives is not fully adultlike at this young age, as the 2-year-olds showed a tendency to misinterpret adjectival passives as verbal passives in the picture-ID task. This result is especially noteworthy as it directly contradicts Borer and Wexler’s claims that early passives are adjectival rather than verbal.19
The English passive has a second form, depending on its choice of auxiliary; get
can replace be (cf. The steak got eaten by Suki). It has long been acknowledged that children produce get-passives before be-passives; experimental data (Crain, Thornton, and Murasagi, 1987; cited inCrain and Fodor,1993) has indicated production of full get-passives by age 3, and naturalistic data (Snyder and Stromswold, 1997) shows spontaneous production of these passives without a by-phrase as early as 1;9. Fox and
Grodzinsky (1998) convincingly argue that get-passives also include an A-chain and therefore provide evidence against the maturation hypothesis.
Production of the full passive including an agentby-phrase has been taken by many as the hallmark of total passive mastery on the part of children since Horgan (1978), and has in the past been assumed to be the last stage in passive acquisition. However,
19As a side note,
Borer and Wexler (1987) did not conduct an experiment of their own, but rather reported on naturalistic production (e.g., Berman and Sagi, 1981, cited therein, for Hebrew) and experimental data collected by other researchers (e.g., for English,Maratsos et al.,1985;Horgan, 1978).
empirical results bearing on this issue have been mixed. As noted above, by manipulating the discourse context such that the most felicitous response was a passive including a
by-phrase, Crain et al. (1987, cited in Crain and Fodor, 1993) were able to elicit such verbal passives from 29 out of 32 children as young as 3;4. In contrast, Fox and
Grodzinsky(1998) tested children ages 3;6-5;5 using a truth-value judgment task, and found divided comprehension of full passives; children performed perfectly on actionalget- andbe-passives (John got/was pushed by Mary) and nonactional truncated (i.e., “short”) passives (The bear is seen), but only at chance on nonactional full passives (The boy is seen by the horse).20 The authors interpret these results not as a general problem with the passive, but instead as a problem interpreting the by-phrase itself. They propose that children have trouble with θ-transmission, the process by which a verb assigns an otherwise implicit, thematically unlimited θ-role through the passive by-phrase. In actional passives, the θ-role assigned by the verb is something akin to “affector,” which the homophonous (non-passive) preposition by can itself also assign; children are able to interpret this prepositionally assigned θ-role. Meanwhile, in nonactional truncated passives, there is no by-phrase to interpret. However, when the θ-role assigned by the passive verb and transmitted via theby-phrase must be something other than “affector”— as, for example, in nonactional full passives—, the resulting interpretation by children is incoherent, and children’s semantic interpretations of the sentence fail.
Other researchers have claimed that the lexical semantics of verbs are the cause of children’s problems with the passive. Maratsos et al. (1985) used “who did it?” questions and a picture identification task to examine children’s comprehension of physi- cal action and mental state passives and found that children performed uniformly better on action passives (Donald Duck is kicked by Batman) than on mental passives (Don- ald Duck is remembered by Batman). The authors suggest that difficulty with mental verb passives stems from a general semantic constraint on children’s analysis of the pas-
20
Fox and Grodzinsky(1998) note that this same performance pattern was found inMaratsos et al.(1985).
sive, and they hypothesize that children may be using a gradient of semantic transitivity to determine which verbs may grammatically passivize. In an open-ended spontaneous production task, Pinker et al. (1987) likewise note that children robustly passivized canonical action verbs (those with agent subjects and patient objects), but were less willing to passivize “anticanonical” action verbs (those with agent objects and theme subjects).21 Furthermore, children passivized nonactional verbs (see) less than actional verbs, and verbs of spatial relations (suspend, contain) were split, such that passivization of verbs with location subjects22 occurred more often than of those with theme subjects. The authors propose that English verbs comprise three distinct groups: canonical action
(universally passivizable), anticanonical action (universally nonpassivizable), and non- actional (passivizable by individual language, on a class by class basis). Children are sensitive to the group of “affectedness” constraints which define whether or not a nonac- tional can be passivized. Once they have picked up the thematic core of the passive, then canonical action verbs should be trouble-free, but nonactionals must be learned—class by class—based on positive evidence.
A significant majority of the aforementioned data has come from languages in the Indo-European family, but a growing body of evidence culled from children acquiring non-Indo-European languages indicates that much of the previously documented perfor- mance on passives is not a result of maturation (linguistic or nonlinguistic), but rather dependent on language-specific factors. As mentioned above, children acquiring Sesotho use full, short, and impersonal passives as early as 2;8. These alternate with active uses of the same verbs, indicating that the forms are not simply memorized (Demuth,1989). Similarly, examining naturalistic production in child Zulu, Suzman (1985) found that
21None of these anticanonical action verbs exist in English, nor do
Pinker et al. (1987) mention any language in which they do exist. Pinker et al. (following Marantz, 1982; cited therein) created and taught children artificial verbs for this category (e.g., The dog floosed the giraffe, meaning ‘the giraffe leapfrogged over the dog’).
22Both of these types of spatial relation verbs (location subject and theme subject) were, like the anticanonical action verbs, created by the researchers.
children produced routinized passive-form answers to passive-form questions shortly after age 2, and that children ages 2;7–3;2 used adversitive23 passive forms not directly tied to adult input (although these were relatively rare). Likewise, although children acquir- ing Quiche Mayan use mostly active-voice sentences, they begin using both the passive and the antipassive24 at age 2 (
Pye and Poz, 1988). Interestingly, in a comparison with Pinker et al.’s (1987) data, Quiche children were shown to spontaneously pro- duce at least 8 times as many passive forms compared to English children; these forms included nonactional and full passives (Pye and Poz, 1988). Moreover, in a picture- identification task testing 4- and 5-year-olds on comprehension of the active, passive, and agentive voices, Quiche children responded at chance to active sentences, which English children have no trouble with. Finally, Quiche children showed no effect of semantics on their comprehension of the passive; they performed equally well on both actional and nonactional passives. As a last example, spontaneous productive use of the passive, in- cluding both basic and complex passives, can be observed in child Inuktitut from 2;0 onwards (Allen and Crago, 1996).
The passive construction in each of these languages (Sesotho, Zulu, Quiche, and Inuktitut) is formally akin to that in English and other Indo-European languages; that is, each involves A-movement operating under similar morphosyntactic demands. As a result, it cannot be argued that Inuktitut- or Mayan-speaking children acquire the passive earlier due to the relative simplicity of the construction in their language (i.e., if there were no passive A-chain involved). Likewise, if children acquiring these languages show mastery of these forms at such a young age, it cannot be the case that A-movement only biologically matures after the age of 4.
What previously appeared to be a “delay” in passive acquisition by English-
23
Suzman(1985, p. 135) describes these as “passives in which. . . someone. . . had something bad hap- pen to them”; e.g.,iyanqunywa‘it was slaughtered.’
24In
Pye and Poz’s (1988) words, “Antipassive constructions provide a means of emphasizing the role of the subject. In an antipassive the object is demoted to an oblique position or remains unexpressed” (p. 73).
acquiring children instead begins to look more like an artifact of the relative scarcity of the construction in the language-specific input; when the passive appears more often (as is the case in the non-Indo-European languages just considered), the acquisitional delay disappears. The implication here is that all children, given enough exemplars of the construction, have the potential to produce and comprehend passive constructions from a very early age, but that this ability is masked in the acquisition of languages in which exemplars of the construction are fewer and further between (see Newport
et al., 1977, for a discussion of how input affects acquisition).
3.2.2 Unaccusatives