Keywords
Experimental study
Language acquisition
How to Cite
Abstract
Absolutive sentences consist of a verb valence alternation observed in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), such as “The ball kicked”[“The ball was kicked”]. According to Negrão & Viotti (2010), in these structures the argument that would represent the energy responsible for the cause of the event is not present and is not even conceptualized. Therefore, there is no inductive force and vP is not projected (NEGRÃO & VIOTTI, 2010). We hypothesized that instrumental verbs (such as “paint”) might have their inductive force conceptualized by their instrument (brush). In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted an elicited production task with 56 children between 3;8 and 6;0 (in two groups) and 28 adults, speakers of BP. Participants watched animations and had to describe to a puppet what had happened in each one. Therefore, the conditions tested were: presence of an agent (with and without) and type of verb (instrumental and non-instrumental). The results suggest that both conditions influenced the participants' productions: contexts without agents (p-value <.0001) and contexts with non-instrumental verbs (p-value <.0001) favored the production of absolutive sentences. Regarding the difference in behavior across groups, younger children produced more absolutives than passives, which indicates that the absolutive, being less complex, is a more accessible structure in the initial stages of the acquisition of BP.
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