Children’s Use of English Articles in Intransitive and Transitive Sentences

Joo, Kum-Jeong

doi:10.30961/lr.2022.58.2.157

Lang. Res. 58(2):157-176

pISSN: 0254-4474, eISSN: 2586-7113

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30961/lr.2022.58.2.157

Article

Children’s Use of English Articles in Intransitive and Transitive Sentences

Kum-Jeong Joo ¹ ^, ^†

Author Information & Copyright ▼

¹Induk University

^†Corresponding Author: Assistant Professor, Department of Business English, Induk University, 12 Choansan-ro, Nowon-gu, Seoul, Korea, 01878, Korea, E-mail: jookj@induk.ac.kr

ⓒ Copyright 2022 Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Jun 22, 2022 ; Revised: Aug 23, 2022 ; Accepted: Aug 29, 2022

Published Online: Aug 31, 2022

ABSTRACT

This study presents new evidence that young children use English articles in an adult-like fashion, suggesting that children seem to know the function of English articles from the earliest observable ages. In adult language, indefinite NPs tend to appear in the subject position of intransitive verbs and the object position of transitive verbs. The study analyzes children’s early speech data for this pattern. The data consist of speech samples from six children, with mean lengths of utterances ranging from 2.0 to 3.1, and speech samples from six adults to provide a benchmark. The results demonstrate that in the data from both the adults and children, indefinite NPs with indefinite articles tend to appear in the subject position of intransitive verbs and the object position of transitive verbs, suggesting that very young children can use articles in similar patterns to those of adults.

Keywords: usage of articles; language acquisition; syntactic position

References

Bottari, P., Cipriani, P., & Chilosi, A. M. (1993/1994). Protosyntactic devices in the acquisition of Italian free morphology. Language Acquisition, 3, 327-369.

Braunwald, S. R. (1995). Differences in the acquisition of early verbs: Evidence from diary data from sisters. In M. Tomasello & W. E. Merriman (Eds.), Beyond names for things: Young children's acquisition of verbs (pp. 81-111). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Du Bois J. W. (1987). The discourse basis of ergativity. Linguistic Society of America, 63(4), 805-855.

Du Bois, J. W. (2003). Discourse and grammar. In M. Tomasello (Ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure (pp. 47-87). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Eisenbeiss, S. (2000). The acquisition of the determiner phrase in German child language. In M.-A. Friedman & L. Rizzi (Eds.), The acquisition of syntax (pp. 26-62). London: Longman.

Givón, T. (1979). On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.

Ihns, M., & Leonard, L. B. (1988). Syntactic categories in early child language: Some additional data. Journal of Child Language, 15, 673-678.

Joo, K-J., & Deen, K. (2019). Intrasentential binding and extrasentential binding in child and adult Korean. First Language, 39(6), 633-651.

10.

Joo, K-J., & Yoo, I. W. (2018). Early articles in English child language: Impostors or overt instantiations of nominal functional categories? Language Acquisition, 25, 224-230.

11.

Joo, K-J., Yoo, I. W., & Kim, K. (2020). Syntactic categories in early child English: A corpus study of article production. Journal of Cognitive Science, 21(4), 595-618.

12.

MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed., Vols. 1-2). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

13.

Meylan, S. C., Frank, M. C., Roy, B. C., & Levy, R. (2017). The emergence of an abstract grammatical category in children's early speech. Psychological Science, 28, 181-192.

14.

Otsu, Y. (1994). Early acquisition of scrambling in Japanese. In T. Hoekstra & B. D. Schwartz (Eds.), Language acquisition studies in generative grammar (pp. 253-264). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

15.

Pine, J. M., & Lieven, E. V. M. (1997). Slot and frame patterns and the development of the determiner category. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18, 123-138.

16.

Pine, J. M., & Martindale, H. (1996). Syntactic categories in the speech of young children: The case of the determiner. Journal of Child Language, 23, 369-395.

17.

Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English syntax: The nature of early child grammars of English. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

18.

Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: The emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In K. E. Nelson (Ed.), Children's language (Vol. 4, pp. 1-28). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

19.

Suppes, P. (1974). The semantics of children's language. American Psychologist, 29, 103-114.

20.

Valian, V. (1986). Syntactic categories in the speech of young children. Developmental Psychology, 22, 562-579.

21.

Valian, V., Solt, S., & Stewart, J. (2009). Abstract categories or limited-scope formulae? The case of children's determiners. Journal of Child Language, 36, 743-778.

22.

Yang, C. (2013). Ontogeny and phylogeny of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(16), 6324-6327.