Acquisition of argument structures and ditransitive verbs: Evidence from an elliptical language

Abstract

In first language acquisition, verbs can be regarded as the word types which are more challenging to comprehend and interpret due to their cognitive and linguistic constraints (Sofu & Ertekin Sucak, 2018). In essence, children can make inferences about the types of verb meanings from the possible number of arguments that the verbs can take (Becker, 2005). For this reason, it is crucial to know how children acquire argument structures of the verbs, especially the arguments of ditransitive verbs which include two internal arguments in its phrase. To this end, this cross-sectional study scrutinizes how Turkish children acquire argument structures of ditransitive verbs in their mother tongue. 10 children were presented a task including nine sentences built with ditransitive verbs. Words in those nine sentences were intentionally ordered differently; and each sentence was formed with different subjects and objects. Specifically, sentences which could be frequently used in the kindergarten context were included in the task. Moreover, a particular focus was on circumstances when Turkish children omit argument structures in their spontaneous speech. Both comprehension and production data which were analyzed descriptively indicate that children are successful at interpreting and producing argument structures and they are aware of argument omission. In addition, they do not rely on word order in order to correctly interpret and make use of arguments in their speech.