How do young monolingual children learn to map form to meaning? What stages do they go through? What types of linguistic errors do they make and what can these tell us about their development? Are there typological elements in understudied languages that could shed new light on this problem?

These questions focus on the acquisition of language in young language learners. Acquiring systematic patterns alongside numerous exceptions poses one of the biggest challenges to a child learning a language. For example, every language has ways of expressing causativity – a type of action involving an agentive causer who changes the state or the position of a causee. At least one of four different causative structures occurs in any language with varying levels of productivity and frequency: lexical, morphological, periphrastic, and light verb constructions. A child must thus extract the general syntactic and semantic rules of the structures appropriate for her language, while also learning the idiosyncratic pairings of particular verbs with those structures.

In this project, we explore causativity in Persian as it develops in child language. While the four different types of causatives structures exist in Persian, light verb constructions are the most productive. Light verb constructions consist of a nominal or adjectival preverbal element and one of 14 light verbs, often producing non-compositional semantics (e.g. yad gereftæn ‘to learn’ lit. memory give, bærq zædæn ‘to shine’ lit. shine hit). Frequency analysis shows that lexical causatives are frequent at all ages in our data, while the other types of causatives vary according to age. We are particularly interested in how light verb constructions become more frequent, and how children use systematic patterns to learn how to express causativity.  

We address qualitative and quantitative questions by analyzing spontaneous speech data from four Persian-speaking children (1;11-6;7), recorded over a year-long period, available on CHILDES (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/browser/index.php?url=Other/Farsi/Family/).Based on previous studies in other languages, we use qualitative evidence, including errors and alternations of light verbs, to explore different properties of the developmental path of the children under study. We also perform quantitative analyses on the frequency of different types of causatives during different developmental stages to help in gaining a global picture of how the causative develops in Persian.

Representative Presentation

Family, N., and Allen, S.E.M. (2012, July). Productivity in the Persian Causative Construction, 4th UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, King's College London, UK.