GIVEN-BEFORE-NEW: THE EFFECTS OF DISCOURSE ON …

GIVEN-BEFORE-NEW:

THE EFFECTS OF DISCOURSE ON ARGUMENT STRUCTURE IN

EARLY CHILD LANGUAGE

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Nola M. Stephens

May 2010

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ns375tr4692

© 2010 by Nola Marie Stephens. All Rights Reserved.

Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

ii



http://purl.stanford.edu/ns375tr4692

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Eve Clark, Primary Adviser


Herbert Clark


Beth Levin


Thomas Wasow

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.

Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file inUniversity Archives.

iii

iv

Abstract

Child language researchers, particularly those studying the acquisition of syntax,

have often viewed young children’s utterances as isolated and self-contained units

of analysis. But “language does not exist in a vacuum” (Clark & Clark 1978:227),

and utterances don’t either. This dissertation explores the influence of conversational

context on early word order. Specifically, I consider how discourse givenness affects

the order of postverbal arguments in the speech of preschool children.

In three elicited production studies, I systematically varied the structure of the

discourse children heard just before they were asked to describe a filmed vignette.

Study 1 targeted verbs of locative transfer, both alternating locative verbs (cf. She

squirted the hotdog with the ketchup. vs. She squirted the ketchup on the hotdog.) and

non-alternating ones (cf. She filled the cup with sand. vs. *She filled sand into the

cup.). Studies 2 and 3 targeted alternating dative verbs (cf. She gave the man the

hat. vs. She gave the hat to the man.). These studies provide converging evidence

that (i) givenness has a robust effect on early argument ordering—like adults, children

tend to use given-before-new ordering, (ii) this discourse effect can be largely, but not

fully, attributed to the effect of discourse on referring expressions (viz. that given

arguments tend to be pronominal and new ones tend to be lexical), (iii) givenness

does not influence all verbs and all arguments equally. I argue that several factors are

needed to explain the asymmetrical effects of givenness across verbs and arguments.

v

These include patterns of distribution in the input, conceptual biases, and semantic

and pragmatic properties of the verbs.

I also evaluate several mechanisms that might drive early given-before-new order-

ing: those that are addressee-based, speaker-based, or experience-based. My data do

not decide between these, but they do offer preliminary evidence in favor of a speaker-

based account. Ultimately, my dissertation highlights the importance of approaching

syntactic acquisition from several directions simultaneously. Children must learn to

attend to cues from form, function, and discourse and use their limited processing ca-

pacities to integrate these cues into a larger model of language production. Linguists

must do likewise.

vi

Acknowledgments

Many thanks first to my committee. To Eve Clark, my advisor: Five years ago, you

called me in my dorm room in Indiana and said, “I hope this one works.” I’m so glad it

did, and that’s thanks in large part to you. You have shaped my thoughts and shared

so many of your own with me. For all the wonderful guidance, advice, encouragement,

warmth, and laughs (both with me and at me), thank you! To Beth Levin: Thank

you for the many invaluable insights, for carefully reading and rereading essentially

everything I’ve written, for keeping me on track and well-read, for your book on verbs,

for always filling the water-boiler, and for much more! To Herb Clark: Thank you

for all the thought-provoking comments, and especially for demonstrating to me how

someone can be fabulously kind and intellectually terrifying at the same time. Just

thinking about you keeps me on my toes. And to Tom Wasow: So many thanks for

stepping in at the last minute and for all of your help and kindness from the start.

I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Joan Bresnan, who has taught, challenged,

helped, and supported me all along the way. In meetings with you, I felt like my

brain was running the gauntlet. My brain and my thesis both are better off for

having been near you. And interacting with you has always been deeply encouraging

to me. Thank you for that. Warm thanks also to Peter Sells for his part in guiding

me through my first few years here. And thanks, Dan Jurafsky, for all the friendly

hellos and for purchasing the water-boiler.

vii

Victor Kuperman: You were God’s gift to me. At my point of greatest despair and

least confidence, you came along—exactly the person I needed, my statistical hero,

and my friend. Thank you for the countless hours you gave so freely and patiently.

For sharing your skills, your advice, your food, your liquor, your stories, and your

very dear family, thank you! May the blessing return to you and Katya and Boris

and Joseph many times over!

I’m thankful also for the staff and children at Bing. Thank you for working with

me and playing with me! You made my research delightful. Special thanks to little

“Bat Junior” (Batman’s son)—for the priceless reminder not to worry, when I was, in

fact, worried, and for doing such a beautiful job of “protecting” me. You were right,

of course: “All [you] had to do was stand there, and they all just fell down dead.”

And thanks to Aya Inamori, whose help transcribing and coding was solid gold.

And to all my friends and colleagues and even a couple of strangers who starred in

my “filmed vignettes.” And to my friend May Lin Au Yong who filmed and did most

of the editing for my first vignettes and who taught me how to survive the rest.

Many thanks also to the linguistics (and psychology) graduate students and post-

docs who have been here with me. A big thank you to my cohort—Anubha Kothari,

Olga Dmitrieva, and Stacy Lewis. We’ve heard that seven is better than four; but

three’s company, and what excellent company you’ve been! Special thanks also to

Anubha for sitting next to me year after year—it’s been grand having you there. And

thanks to Andrew Koontz-Garboden, Bruno Estigarribia, Lauren Hall-Lew, and Inbal

Arnon who made the path before me better. And to Marie-Catherine de Marneffe,

Uriel Cohen Priva, Scott (Oscar) Grimm, Matt Adams, Adriana Weisleder, Seung

Kyung Kim, Middy Pineda, and Chigusa Kurumada, Patricia Amaral, and Susan

Bobb for your help and friendship.

viii

Thank you also to my professors, mentors, and friends at Indiana University who

got me to Stanford and have cheered me on ever since. Extra thanks to Natusko

Tsujimura, Dan Dinnsen, and Rania Rizk.

And thank you to my friends at IVGrad (and nearby). I adore you. And I’ll miss

you even more than I’ll miss the weather. It seems unfair that I’ve had such a wealth

of incredible friends here. You’ve carried me though and amazed me on a daily basis—

it really would have been worth it just to spend the last five years with you. Special

thanks to a few (roughly in order of appearance): Rachel (bc, ag, gfm), Lena and

Zach, Eun-Mee, Alissa and Todd, Diane Schouten, Jacob Mattingley, Olivia, Kristyn

and Jonathan, May Lin, Nani-Nani, Xianne, Sadie, Nate and Amy, Ashley Wellman,

Neth, Kassahun, Rachel Gong, Heather, Kierstin, Liz Milner, Susan, and the Wu.

And above all, to Pete and Maria: From the beginning to the end, you have been

my pastors, counselors, therapists, teachers, co-conspirators, and my friends. You are

Stanford to me.

My very best thanks go to my family (on both sides of the Red River). Thank

you for your unconditional and self-evident love, for your wisdom, for all the best

memories, and for every prayer. I’m especially thankful to my parents—all of them—

and to my brother, Branson. Mom and Barry and Branson, you raised me to believe

that learning is about as important as breathing. I can’t imagine how any of this

would have been possible without you—it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.

Dad, I’ve always been inspired by your unwavering confidence in me. Thank you also

for every loving reminder to enjoy my days here. (I’m so happy you found someone

to enjoy yours with along the way!) Mutti and Du, perhaps everybody needs another

set of parents. I did, and I got the best set out there. Thank you!

And one last thing before I thank the NSF: Mom, for the war you waged so that

I would finally learn to read, thank you. Let’s call this document a tribute to that

effort!

ix

My dissertation is based in part upon work supported by the National Science

Foundation under Grant Number IIS-0624345 to Stanford University for the research

project “The Dynamics of Probabilistic Grammar” (PI Joan Bresnan). The opinions,

findings, and conclusions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect

the views of the National Science Foundation.

x

Contents

Abstract v

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 The alternations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

1.2.1 Semantic properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1.2.2 Syntactic properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

1.2.3 Discourse properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

1.3 Acquisition of argument structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

1.3.1 Locative alternation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

1.3.2 Dative alternation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

1.4 Acquisition of information structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

1.4.1 Referring expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

1.4.2 Word order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

1.5 Accounting for given-before-new ordering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

1.5.1 Addressee-based accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

1.5.2 Speaker-based accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

1.5.3 Statistical-learning accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

xi

1.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

2 Study 1: Locative alternation 42

2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

2.2 Study 1A: Child locatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

2.2.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

2.2.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

2.2.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

2.3 Study 1B: Adult locatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

2.3.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

2.3.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

2.3.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

2.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

3 Study 2: Dative alternation 81

3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

3.2 Study 2A: Child datives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

3.2.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

3.2.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

3.2.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

3.3 Study 2B: Adult datives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

3.3.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

3.3.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

3.3.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

4 Study 3: Dative alternation revisited 125

4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

xii

4.2 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

4.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

4.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

4.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

5 Conclusion 161

5.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

5.2 Do children use given-first or new-first ordering? . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

5.3 Are all verbs equally affected by givenness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

5.4 Are all arguments equally affected by givenness? . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

5.5 Are the effects due to referring expressions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

5.6 Why do children use given-before-new ordering? . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

5.7 Adding new information to the discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

xiii

List of Tables

1.1 CHILDES: Age of first use of double-object datives and prepositional

datives in previous corpus studies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

1.2 Bates 1976: Summary of Claudio and Francesco’s early SO and OS

productions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

2.1 Study 1: List of locatums and locations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

2.2 Study 1A: Results of model predicting locatum-object constructions. 52

2.3 Study 1A: Proportion of responses with locatum-objects. . . . . . . 53

2.4 CHILDES: Distribution of verbs in parental speech to 7 children. . . 64

2.5 APW: Distribution of verbs in the English Gigaword Third Edition

corpus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

3.1 Study 2A: Distribution of responses with one postverbal argument. . 90

3.2 CHILDES: Distribution of verbs with both postverbal arguments in

parental speech to 7 children. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

3.3 Study 2B: Distribution of responses with one postverbal argument. . 108

3.4 Study 2B: Results of model predicting prepositional datives in re-

sponses with two postverbal arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

3.5 Study 2B: Results of model predicting prepositional datives in re-

sponses with two postverbal arguments and lexical themes. . . . . . 116

3.6 Study 2B: Distribution of responses with two postverbal arguments. . 118

xiv

4.1 Study 3: List of verbs and events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

4.2 Study 3: Patterns of verb use and substitutions. . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

4.3 Study 3: Distribution of responses with one postverbal argument. . . 137

4.4 Study 3: Proportion of responses with one vs. two postverbal arguments.137

4.5 Study 3: Proportion of prepositional datives in responses with two

postverbal arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

4.6 Study 3: Results of model predicting prepositional datives in responses

with two postverbal arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

4.7 Study 3: Results of model predicting prepositional datives in responses

with two postverbal arguments and lexical themes. . . . . . . . . . . 147

4.8 Study 3: Proportion of prepositional datives in responses with two

lexical postverbal arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

4.9 Study 3: Frequency and length of pauses in responses with two postver-

bal arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

4.10 Study 3: Distribution of disfluencies in responses with two postverbal

arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

4.11 Study 3: Results of model predicting the presence of disfluencies. . . 153

xv

List of Figures

2.1 Study 1A: Proportion of locatum-object constructions by age. . . . 53

2.2 Study 1A: Proportion of locatum-object constructions by verb. . . . 54

2.3 Study 1A: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs.

new locatums (above) and locations (below). . . . . . . . . . . . 56

2.4 Study 1A: Proportion of locatum- vs. location-object construc-

tions for each type of locatum (above) and location (below). . . . 59

2.5 Study 1A: Proportion of locatum-object constructions in responses

with lexical postverbal arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

2.6 Study 1B: Proportion of locatum-object constructions in responses

with two postverbal arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

2.7 Study 1B: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs.

new locatums (above) and locations (below). . . . . . . . . . . . 75

3.1 Study 2A: Proportion of prepositional datives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

3.2 Study 2A: Distribution of information structure patterns. . . . . . . . 93

3.3 Study 2A: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs.

new themes (above) and recipients (below). . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

3.4 Study 2A: Proportion of prepositional (theme-first) vs. double-object

datives (recipient-first) for each type of theme (above) and recip-

ient (below). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

xvi

3.5 Study 2B: Proportion of prepositional datives in responses with two

postverbal arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

3.6 Study 2B: Distribution of information structure patterns. . . . . . . . 111

3.7 Study 2B: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs.

new themes (above) and recipients (below). . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

3.8 Study 2B: Proportion of prepositional (theme-first) vs. double-object


ient (below). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

4.1 Study 3: Proportion of prepositional datives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

4.2 Study 3: Distribution of information structure patterns. . . . . . . . . 141

4.3 Study 3: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs. new

themes (above) and recipients (below). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

4.4 Study 3: Proportion of prepositional (theme-first) vs. double-object


ient (below). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

xvii

xviii

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Introduction

As children acquire language, they must learn to harmonize a large and complex

collection of knowledge. Children need to learn not only what is grammatical and

ungrammatical, but also which linguistic expressions to use in a given context. This

dissertation is primarily concerned with how children employ linguistic context in

deciding how to order words in a sentence. Consider the sentences in (1).

(1) a. She gave the hat to the man.

b. She gave the man the hat.

Children acquiring English need to learn that both of these sentences are grammatical

and that both can describe the same event. But they also need to learn how to

choose between these two orderings in production. Previous research has shown

that adult construction choice reflects a tendency to order given information (i.e.,

information previously mentioned in the discourse) before new information when this

option is available in the grammar (e.g., Firbas 1964; Halliday 1967a; Bock & Irwin

1980; Prince 1981; Gundel 1988; Levelt 1989; Birner & Ward 1998; Arnold et al.

1

2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

2000; Ward et al. 2002; Wasow 2002; Ferreira & Yoshita 2003; Krifka 2004; Bresnan

& Nikitina 2009). There is little consensus, however, about whether child speech

reflects this same tendency, and many questions remain regarding how and when

children package information in a way that coheres well with prior discourse.

The primary goals of this dissertation are to (1) assess how discourse status (viz.

givenness) affects word order in the speech of English-speaking preschool children, (2)

consider which mechanisms underlie discourse effects (e.g., communicative pressures,

processing pressures, or distributional learning), and (3) explore how discourse effects

interact with other influences on syntactic choices (e.g., frequency, semantic proper-

ties, types of referring expressions). These research questions lie at the intersection

of information structure and argument structure and require attention to both. In

Section 1.2, I introduce the syntactic phenomena under investigation (locative and

dative alternations) and motivate these choices. Section 1.3 discusses a few influential

ideas about how children acquire verb argument structure and reviews previous work

on the acquisition of locative and dative alternations. Section 1.4 then turns to the

acquisition of information structure, and Section 1.5 outlines three potential expla-

nations for given-before-new ordering. Finally, Section 1.6 provides a brief preview

of the ensuing chapters.

1.2 The alternations

The English locative and dative alternations form the empirical focus of this research.

Verbs that participate in these alternations take three arguments, an agent-subject

and two postverbal arguments, and the alternation takes place within the verb phrase.

Locative alternation verbs allow alternative ordering of locatum and location

1.2. THE ALTERNATIONS 3

arguments, and dative alternation verbs allow alternative ordering of theme and

recipient arguments:1

(2) Locative alternation

a. She squirted the ketchup on the hotdog.

(locatum-first: locatum-object variant)

b. She squirted the hotdog with the ketchup.

(location-first: location-object variant)

(3) Dative alternation

a. She gave the hat to the man. (theme-first: prepositional dative variant)

b. She gave the man the hat. (recipient-first: double-object dative variant)

Importantly, not all locative and dative verbs alternate, and of the non-alternating

verbs, some take one ordering and some the other (see Levin 1993). Among loca-

tive verbs, non-alternating verbs (e.g., put, pour) are more frequent in child-directed

speech (CDS) than alternating verbs (e.g., stuff, squirt). Conversely, the most fre-

quent dative verbs in CDS (e.g., give, show) allow alternation, and non-alternating

dative verbs (e.g., donate, recommend, explain) are very rare in CDS. So for alter-

nating verbs, children need to learn that two constructions are acceptable and the

conditions under which one is preferred over the other. For non-alternating verbs,

they must learn that only one construction is acceptable (regardless of the context)

and which structure that is. The learning problem is then further complicated by the

fact that children receive more input for certain types of verbs than for others.1Other labels have been given to these arguments. The locatum (object transferred) is alterna-

tively referred to as the figure or content, and the location (reference point) as the ground,

container, or goal. For datives, grammatical labels are often used: The theme is called the

“direct object” and the recipient the “indirect object.” Other semantic labels for the recipient

are goal and possessor.


Beyond the complexity of the learning problem, the following factors render these

two alternations particularly well-suited to present purposes: The two word order

variants (i) can generally be used to describe the same event, (ii) have very similar or

identical surface syntactic structures, and (iii) allow for an investigation of discourse

effects beyond the subject position. These three advantages are discussed below.

1.2.1 Semantic properties

Although the two variants of the locative and dative alternations are not identical in

meaning, both can generally be used to describe the same event (see Clark 1990; Fisher

et al. 1994). Subtle meaning differences between the variants have been explored at

length in the semantics literature (Green 1974; Oehrle 1976; Rappaport & Levin

1988; Gropen et al. 1989; Pinker 1989; Levin 1993; Krifka 2004; Rappaport Hovav &

Levin 2008, and references therein). Consider again the locative alternation in (2),

which is repeated below:

(4) a. She squirted the ketchup on the hotdog. (locatum-object variant)

b. She squirted the hotdog with the ketchup. (location-object variant)

While both variants of the locative alternation describe a transfer event, the location-

object construction tends to highlight the endstate of the location (e.g., full),

whereas the locatum-object construction is more likely to highlight the manner

in which the locatum is transferred (e.g., by squirting) (see Gropen et al. 1991b).

Meaning differences between the two variants have also been characterized in

terms of object affectedness (see Givón 1984; Gropen 1989; Pinker 1989; Gropen et al.

1991b; Arad 2006). Specifically, the location is understood to be the more affected

entity in the location-object construction, and the locatum is understood to be

the more affected entity in the locatum-object construction. This reasoning has


been used to explain the intuition that location-object constructions have a “holis-

tic” reading, and locatum-object constructions a “partitive” reading (S.R. Anderson

1971; Schwartz-Norman 1976; J.M. Anderson 1977; Jeffries & Willis 1984; Lumsden

1994; see Goldberg 1995:§7.5 for discussion). In other words, using the location as

the direct object suggests that the location is fully affected by the event (e.g., fully

covered with ketchup). When the locatum is the direct object and, therefore, inter-

preted as the more affected entity, the location can (but need not) be interpreted

as only partially affected.

Similar ideas have been proposed for the dative alternation. Like the locative

alternation, datives express a kind of transfer event (sometimes broadly construed).

Prepositional datives (theme-first) as in (5a) are associated with a cause to go mean-

ing, while double-object datives (recipient-first) as in (5b) are associated with a

cause to possess meaning (e.g., Goldberg 1995; Viau 2006; but see Rappaport Hovav

& Levin 2008).

(5) a. She gave the hat to the man. (prepositional dative variant)

b. She gave the man the hat. (double-object dative variant)

This difference can also be attributed to object affectedness (see Gropen et al. 1989;

M. Anderson 2006): Cause to go emphasizes the displacement of the theme, and

cause to possess emphasizes the endstate of the recipient. Some researchers have

also pointed out subtle meaning differences with certain dative verbs (see Green 1974).

For example, the double-object dative in (6a) suggests that Molly caught the ball (i.e.,

was affected by the throwing event/became a possessor), whereas the prepositional

dative in (6b), need not yield the same interpretation (cf. Rappaport Hovav & Levin

2008:§5). Similarly, as Green (1974:158) argued, (7a) “implies that Fido perceived

the bone, while [(7b)] leaves this open.”

(6) a. Sam threw Molly the ball.


b. Sam threw the ball to Molly.

(7) a. John showed Fido a bone. (Green 1974:158 (6a))

b. John showed a bone to Fido. (Green 1974:158 (6b))

Importantly, though, this interpretation of successful transfer with double-object da-

tives is defeasible (Oehrle 1977; see also Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2008):

(8) a. Max handed her a cigarette, but she wouldn’t take it.

(Oehrle 1977:206 (4a))

b. When I took him his mail, I found that he had disappeared.

(Oehrle 1977:206 (4c))

Idioms with dative verbs have been also given as evidence for the firm association

of one semantic interpretation for each construction (e.g., Pinker 1989:110-111; Krifka

2004:12). For example, Krifka (2004) argued that (9a) is acceptable because it conveys

the meaning that Ann possesses the idea, and (9b) is unacceptable because there is

no motion of the idea from Ann to Beth.

(9) a. Ann’s behavior gave Beth this idea. (Krifka 2004:12 (66a))

b. * Ann’s behavior gave this idea to Beth. (Krifka 2004:12 (66b))

Nevertheless, Green (1971) observed that even idioms like these can occur with both

construction types with certain types of arguments (viz. with pronominal themes

or heavy NPs; see also Bresnan & Nikitina 2009). In these cases, the meaning of the

idiom is unchanged by the change in construction:

(10) a. Walt gave Dick the finger, and he gave it to Ted, too.

(Green 1971:87 (19a))

b. That gave an idea to all of us who had read the assignments faithfully.

(Green 1971:90 (39d))


In essence, the semantic biases of these constructions can be neutralized under certain

conditions, and meaning does not fully determine the syntactic choice (see discussions

in Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2008; Bresnan & Nikitina 2009).

While semantic differences should be taken into account in any study of how

children acquire alternations, I will limit my consideration of them to the following

question: When describing identical events, under what circumstances is discourse

pressure able to override semantic biases that encourage the speaker to choose one

construction over the other?

1.2.2 Syntactic properties

Locative and dative alternations are also well suited to research on discourse effects

because of the structural similarity of the two variants. For the locative alternation,

there is no potential confound between complexity of the surface syntactic structure

and choice of construction. Both variants take the form in (11a). The two alternates

of the dative alternation are also similar in syntactic structure, one having the form

in (11a) and the other the form in (11b).2

(11) a. verb + NP + PP

b. verb + NP + NP

Children produce both of these structures very early. Based on data from CHILDES

(MacWhinney 2000), Gropen et al. (1989:212) reported that both prepositional da-

tives (verb + NP + PP) and double-object datives (verb + NP + NP) are frequent2Scholars disagree on whether the variants have underlying structures distinct from the surface

structures (see Waryas & Stremel 1974; Goldberg et al. 2005; Emonds & Whitney 2006; Rappa-

port Hovav & Levin 2008, among many others). Derivational accounts have implications for the

difficulty of each variant for child speakers; but for this dissertation, I take a non-derivational ap-

proach to the syntax of these constructions and limit my attention to whether children have learned

the given surface structures.


in child language and emerge as early as 1;8 (even excluding formulaic responses).

Children in Gropen’s study used both of these dative constructions in spontaneous

speech by age 2 or 3, and there was no clear evidence that one structure emerged

before the other (see §1.3.2 for examples and further discussion).

These facts differ somewhat from those for active/passive alternation. Researchers

generally agree that children learning English master the syntax of active voice before

that of passive voice (e.g., Roeper et al. 1981; but see Clark & Carpenter 1989a;

1989b for evidence that children use functional equivalents of adult-like passives by

age 2; see also Demuth 1989; Budwig 1990). At this point, we cannot conclude (as

some narrative studies have done, see §1.4) that a delay in the use of passive voice

to mark discourse status reflects a general delay in the ability to mark discourse

status with word order. Children may simply avoid passives because they prefer an

easier syntactic structure. By studying behavior with identical or very similar surface

structures, this research project largely avoids the confound of structural complexity.

1.2.3 Discourse properties

In adult language, the ordering of postverbal arguments tends to follow the given-

before-new pattern in cases where multiple argument realizations are possible. For

example, the choice of construction with alternating dative verbs is affected by the

status of the referent as given or new in the discourse (see Halliday 1967a; Halliday

1970; Erteschik-Shir 1979; Givón 1988; Primus 1998; Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2008).

This has been shown in a variety of experimental and corpus studies on several differ-

ent languages (English: Ransom 1979; Smyth et al. 1979; Bock & Irwin 1980; Givón

1984; Thompson 1990; Collins 1995; Arnold et al. 2000; Wasow 2002; Bresnan et al.

2007; Bresnan & Nikitina 2009; see also Waryas & Stremel 1974; Ozón 2006; Japanese:

Ferreira & Yoshita 2003; Korean: Choi 2008; Tahitian and Tahitian French: Snyder

2003). Work on syntactic discourse effects in acquisition, however, has mostly focused

1.3. ACQUISITION OF ARGUMENT STRUCTURE 9

on alternations involving the grammatical subject (see §1.4.2), but these findings

might not be generalizable to other syntactic positions. As mentioned above, chil-

dren might recognize that the subject position has a privileged status with respect

to the discourse (e.g., “when possible, make a given referent the subject”), but do not

yet have a more general notion that given information should be ordered before new

information.

Also, even if children understand that subjects are discourse prominent relative

to objects, they may not understand that the same asymmetry holds between the

first and second arguments in the VP. As discussed in Givón (1984), the discourse

prominence (‘topicality’) of the first object after the verb is secondary to that of

the subject; and across languages, there is less consistency in the marking of the

special discourse status of the first object in comparison to the subject. In fact,

Givón (1984:178) suggested that maintaining two topics in a discourse is universally

less common than maintaining one topic, and that, “This seeming limitation may

ultimately reflect some neurological limits on the processing complexity of the human

organism.” If children show a given-before-new ordering preference for postverbal

arguments, this will provide compelling evidence that children use word order to

mark discourse status more generally.

1.3 Acquisition of argument structure

The literature on the acquisition of verb argument structure is extensive (for a concise

review see Behrens 2007). Broadly speaking, theories of argument structure acqui-

sition can be characterized as either ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’. Top-down accounts

tend to focus on the link between syntax and semantics and argue that (innate)

linking rules provide a way for children to learn syntax from the semantics (seman-

tic bootstrapping, e.g., Pinker 1989, 1994) or to learn semantics from the syntax


(syntactic bootstrapping; e.g., Gleitman 1990). Proponents of these theories have ar-

gued that children at an early age are sensitive to the (subtle) semantic differences

among different syntactic constructions (e.g., Gropen et al. 1989,1991b; Fisher et al.

1994; Brinkmann 1995; Kim et al. 1999; but see Bowerman 1989).

Another type of top-down theory posits that children approach syntax from a

conceptual starting point (Slobin 1985). Very early in development, children be-

gin to categorize events, and they subsequently discover how the event types (e.g.,

agent acts on theme) are encoded in the ambient language (e.g., as transitive sen-

tences). Along these lines, some researchers have considered whether children encode

prototypical events (events they are exposed to more) earlier than non-prototypical

ones. Although children seem to have more difficulty comprehending descriptions

of atypical events than typical events (see 12-13), spontaneous production data do

not support the hypothesis that prototypical events are actually encoded earlier than

non-prototypical events (see Bowerman 1985; Uziel-Karl 2002; Stephens 2008).

(12) Transitive sentences (see Chapman & Miller 1975)

a. Typical event: The boy is carrying the truck.

b. Atypical event: The truck is carrying the boy.

(13) Dative sentences (see Osgood & Zehler 1981)

a. Typical event: The brother gives the sister the block.

b. Atypical event: The tiger gives the cat the puppy.

As Behrens (2007:196) concluded, “To date, there is no evidence for a privileged

conceptual starting point for the acquisition of verb syntax and semantics.”

More recently, bottom-up approaches to argument structure have gained cur-

rency. These accounts argue that knowledge of argument structure can be built

up in a piecemeal fashion by observing distributional patterns in the input (see


Tomasello 2003; Goldberg 2006, and references in §1.5.3). For example, several stud-

ies have shown that item-based input frequency plays an important role in the ac-

quisition of syntactic constructions (e.g., de Villiers 1985; Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg

1998; Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2003; Demuth et al. 2003; Demuth et al. 2005).

One important notion from this literature is Braine & Brooks’s (1995) entrench-

ment hypothesis (see also Brooks et al. 1999; Theakston et al. 2004; Matthews et al.

2005). As summarized in Ambridge et al. (2008:97), entrenchment means that “re-

peated presentation of a verb (e.g., disappear) in one (or more) attested construction

(such as the intransitive construction; e.g., The rabbit disappeared) causes the learner

to gradually form a probabilistic inference that adult speakers do not use that par-

ticular verb in non-attested constructions.” If this is true, argument structure errors

should be more likely with verbs that are less frequent in CDS.

In sum, previous work on the acquisition of argument structure has uncovered a

range of factors that influence early syntax. Some key factors are given in (14).

(14) a. Semantic/conceptual: event type (e.g., caused motion vs. caused posses-

sion), participant type (e.g., agent vs. patient), animacy, affectedness,

prototypicality, plausibility, salience

b. Distributional: input frequency and distribution of verbs, constructions,

and argument types (e.g., noun vs. pronoun; human vs. inanimate)

My dissertation incorporates insights from this literature and attempts to further our

understanding of the factors that influence argument structure acquisition. In the

next subsections, I provide a summary of previous work on the argument structure

of locative and dative verbs in child language acquisition. Despite the interest in

alternations within the argument structure literature, there has been relatively little

work on these alternations (cf. work on active/passive and causative alternations);

and with a few exceptions, none of this work takes discourse into account.


1.3.1 Locative alternation

Using diary data, Bowerman (1982) drew attention to the fact that children some-

times make errors with non-alternating locative verbs, and that these errors are not

restricted to a specific locative construction (examples from Bowerman 1982:338):

(15) a. Locatum-first error: Can I fill some salt into the bear?

b. Location-first error: I spilled it of orange juice.

Bowerman argued that these errors result from overgeneralizing the argument struc-

ture of some verbs to semantically similar verbs. Most subsequent work on the ac-

quisition of locative alternation has focused on semantic aspects of the verbs and

constructions involved.

In a cross-linguistic production study, Kim et al. (1999) elicited locative construc-

tions from children (aged 3 and 4) for 14 locative verbs using both partitive and

holistic events. There was no effect of the partitive/holistic manipulation. Con-

struction choices from the adult control group were very similar to the children’s

construction choices, except with the verb fill. English-speaking adults never used

fill (an arguably non-alternating location-object verb) with locatum-objects, but

children did so 56% of the time. The other location-object verbs, however, were

produced with high accuracy, and the verb-by-verb correlations between mother and

child uses were very high. Thus, the errors with fill were probably not due to the fact

that locatum-object constructions are generally more common across locative verbs.

Kim et al. speculated that children make errors with fill because this verb exhibits

a large amount of cross-linguistic diversity in its argument expression, and English-

speaking children have not yet learned the ‘idiosyncratic rule” that fill requires a

location-object.

The most extensive research on the acquisition of English locative alternation is

that of Jess Gropen and his colleagues (Gropen 1989; Gropen et al. 1991a,1991b).


These researchers argued that children use an innate and universal rule which links

affected arguments to the object position. They elicited locative event descriptions

for familiar verbs (pour, fill, dump, empty, stuff, splash) (Gropen 1989: Experiments

1-2; Gropen et al. 1991b) and for novel verbs (Gropen 1989: Experiments 3-6; Gropen

et al. 1991a). The children in these studies ranged in age from 2;6 to 9;1, and the pri-

mary focus was on how the manner and endstate of the event influenced construction

choice (see §1.2.1). Overall, Gropen and his colleagues argued that more locatum-

object responses were produced when the locatum was affected (i.e., when the man-

ner was highlighted), and more location-object responses were produced when the

location was affected (i.e., when the endstate was highlighted). Gropen’s work also

tangentially addresses issues of information structure. I discuss his findings related

to discourse status in Section 1.4.

1.3.2 Dative alternation

Early work on the acquisition of the dative alternation focused primarily on the order

in which children acquire the two dative constructions. Several comprehension studies

found that children (aged 3-10) had more difficulty acting out double-object datives

than prepositional datives (e.g., Cook 1976; Roeper et al. 1981; Osgood & Zehler

1981). These studies manipulated the animacy of the postverbal arguments (theme

and recipient). This manipulation influenced the interpretation of double-object

datives, but not necessarily that of prepositional datives. In particular, children had

trouble acting out sentences like those in (16), which deviate from the prototypical

pattern of animate recipient and inanimate theme (e.g., Give the man the car ; see

also Fraser et al. 1963; Fischer 1971).

(16) a. Give the car the man. (inanimate recipient, animate theme)

b. Give the cow the horse. (animate recipient, animate theme)


But as White (1987) noted, adults might also struggle to interpret these sentences,

perhaps because they describe highly atypical events. In fact, in a preliminary study of

adult comprehension of dative constructions, Steedman & Johnson-Laird (1978:188)

found that adults were slower to read double-object datives with two animate postver-

bal arguments than to read corresponding prepositional datives. When the theme

was inanimate and the recipient animate, latencies were essentially the same for

double-object and prepositional datives. White (1987) tested children (aged 3;8-5;8)

on their comprehension of plausible double-object and prepositional datives (ani-

mate recipients, inanimate themes). She found that accuracy was not related to

construction type, and children never misinterpreted the thematic roles of the two

postverbal arguments. Using a novel verb paradigm in a production study, Conwell

& Demuth (2007) also found that three-year-olds have productive knowledge of the

dative alternation and, under certain experimental conditions, can generalize a verb

they learned in one construction to the other (see also Shimpi et al. 2007).

Corpus studies with familiar verbs further indicate that young children use both

prepositional and double-object datives. As mentioned in Section 1.2.2, Gropen et al.

(1989) found no compelling evidence that one construction is acquired before the

other. On the other hand, Viau (2006) argued that double-object datives emerge

“significantly” earlier than prepositional datives (see also Snyder & Stromswold 1997).

But in Viau’s corpus study, the average gap between the first use of each was only

3 months. This difference may be statistically significant, but it need not mean that

the syntax of prepositional datives is more difficult to acquire than that of double-

object datives or that the gap has important implications for language development.3

Despite some controversy over the order of acquisition, studies of spontaneous child

speech consistently show that children use both constructions by age 3. Table 1.13Like Snyder & Stromswold (1997), Viau’s results are based on age of first mention. For a critical

analysis of this measure see Abbot-Smith & Behrens 2006.


provides a summary of these studies, all of which included a broad range of verbs.4

Some examples of early datives (including non-adult-like uses) are given below.

(17) Examples of prepositional datives (from Snyder 2003:53)

a. She bringed the tiny little baby pony to Daddy. (Terrance M., 4;11)

b. I gave a piece of sugar candy to Jonah yesterday. (Billy B., 7;2)

(18) Examples of double-object datives (from Gropen et al. 1989)

a. Show Fraser horsie. (Eve, 1;9)

b. You can write me a lady on that page. (Eve, 2;3)

c. Give doggie paper. (Adam, 2;3)

d. Jay said me no. (Ross, 2;8)

Study Double-object datives Prepositional dativesGropen et al. (1989) 1;8-2;11 1;11-3;0Snyder & Stromswold (1997) 1;8-2;11 2;0-3;4Campbell & Tomasello (2001) 1;6-2;9 1;10-3;2Viau (2006) 1;7-2;10 1;10-3;4

Table 1.1: CHILDES: Age of first use of double-object datives and prepositionaldatives in previous corpus studies.

These experimental and corpus results clearly demonstrate that children are able

to produce both variants of the dative alternation by age 4 (the age tested in my dative

studies). Prior research has also suggested that the following factors also influence

the acquisition of dative constructions: (a) item-based input frequency of the verb

in a particular construction (Campbell & Tomasello 2001), (b) structural persistence4Except for Campbell & Tomasello (2001), all of the authors mentioned in Table 1.1 specified that

they excluded formulaic utterances for their analyses. For lists of verbs found in these spontaneous

child datives, see Gropen et al. (1989:213ff) and Campbell & Tomasello (2001:260).


(Shimpi et al. 2007; Thothathiri & Snedeker 2008; de Marneffe et al. Submitted; see

also Conwell & Demuth 2007), (c) semantic properties of the event (Mazurkewich

& White 1984; Gropen et al. 1989; cf. Campbell & Tomasello 2001; Goldberg et al.

2005; Conwell & Demuth 2007), and (d) morphological characteristics of the verb (see

Mazurkewich & White 1984; Gropen et al. 1989). In Section 1.4.2 below, I discuss

three studies that also address information structure in the acquisition of English

dative alternation.

1.4 Acquisition of information structure

Most discussions of information structure and notions like “given” and “new” informa-

tion begin with complaints about the terminological and conceptual chaos surrounding

these ideas. In light of this confusion, a careful discussion of terminology is in order

before I review relevant findings in the acquisition literature. Kruijff-Korbayová &

Steedman (2003:250) defined information structure broadly as:

the utterance-internal structural and semantic properties reflecting the

relation of an utterance to the discourse context, in terms of the discourse

status of its content, the actual and attributed attentional states of the

discourse participants, and the participants’ prior and changing attitudes

(knowledge, beliefs, intentions, expectations, etc.).

This definition encompasses a host of different notions that have been proposed in

the literature to account for discourse-related phenomena. As Kruijff-Korbayová &

Steedman (2003) pointed out, theories about information structure, though diverse,

generally draw from one or both of two (often overlapping) dimensions.

One dimension corresponds to Gundel’s category of “relational givenness” and

subsumes notions such as “topic/comment,” “theme/rheme,” and “topic/focus” (see

1.4. ACQUISITION OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE 17

Gundel 1988; Gundel & Fretheim 2004). This dimension distinguishes between two

main parts of an utterance. The first part relates the utterance to the discourse

purpose and can be characterized roughly as what the utterance is about (see, e.g.,

Gundel 1988; Halliday 1967b:211). The second part further advances the discourse

and generally provides new information associated with the first part. The other

dimension corresponds to Gundel’s “referential givenness” and is tied to notions such

as “given/new,” “background/kontrast,” and “contextually bound/nonbound.” This

dimension does not necessarily break the sentence into two parts, but rather dis-

tinguishes between elements (e.g., referring expressions) in an utterance in terms of

their informational status in the discourse. For overviews and comparisons of these

ideas, see Bates & MacWhinney (1979), Vallduví (1992:Ch. 3), Arnold (1998), and

Kruijff-Korbayová & Steedman (2003), among others.

This dissertation essentially concerns the second dimension mentioned above (viz.

referential givenness). I am interested, in particular, in the relative ordering of two NP

arguments within the verb phrase and how this order depends on their informational

status in the discourse. Information structure notions that divide a sentence only

into two parts, like “topic/comment,” do not straightforwardly capture informational

differences between multiple elements or arguments within the predicate (see Givón

1984:154; Vallduví 1992:34). Also, I will not be concerned with the discourse status of

the grammatical subject, though it might be considered more ‘given’ or ‘topical’ than

either of the postverbal arguments. In my studies, the status of the subject is held

constant across discourse conditions. For this research, I need a notion of discourse

status that can apply to sentence elements that are not necessarily the ‘primary topic’

(see Givón 1984:154).

Restricting the focus to referential givenness, however, still leaves open the ques-

tion of how exactly givenness is defined. Here, two questions are relevant:

(19) a. How is givenness conceived of generally?


b. Is givenness a binary distinction?

Regarding the first question (19a), I will use the term givenness in the sense of what

Clark & Marshall (1981) referred to as linguistic copresence—a referent is given if

it has been mentioned in the conversation, and new otherwise (i.e., if it is textually

evoked in the sense of Prince 1981, or discourse-old information as in Prince 1992

and Ward et al. 2002). Bock & Irwin (1980:467) noted that, “a definite referring

expression [. . . ] with a coreferential antecedent in an immediately preceding sentence

is an uncontroversial example of given information.” For the experiments discussed

below, all given entities satisfy this description.

Importantly, this type of givenness (viz. linguistic copresence) may or may not

overlap with givenness due to what Clark & Marshall (1981) called physical copres-

ence (i.e., when the referent is perceptually available and jointly attended to by the

speaker and addressee—a situationally evoked referent in Prince’s taxonomy). In my

studies, all of the referents for the arguments of the verb are physically copresent, but

only some of them are linguistically copresent, as will be made clear in the methods

sections. Crucially, my use of the term ‘given’ will only refer to entities that are lin-

guistically copresent, regardless of their psychical copresence. Though these types of

mutual knowledge can be difficult to tease apart in corpus data, experimental settings

allow for a careful specification of both.

Givenness in terms of linguistic copresence should also be distinguished from given-

ness that is defined with reference to knowledge states. Prince (1981) summarized sev-

eral ways in which givenness has been equated with knowledge states (see also O’Neill

2005; Birner & Ward 2009): information is considered ‘given’ (or ‘old’, ‘known’, etc.)

if (i) the speaker assumes the hearer can predict its occurrence in the ensuing dis-

course or recover it from the preceding discourse (e.g., Kuno 1972; Halliday 1967b),

(ii) the speaker assumes the hearer has that information in his or her consciousness

at the time of the utterance (e.g., Chafe 1976), or (iii) the speaker assumes the hearer


knows or can infer the information even if the hearer is not thinking about it (e.g.,

Clark & Haviland 1977).

One aspect that unites these three notions of givenness is that they make reference

to something the speaker assumes about the knowledge state of the hearer. While

this assumption on the part of the speaker may well be what drives speakers to

treat various pieces of information differently in a discourse, a concept of givenness

based on speaker assumptions somewhat unwieldy for linguistic analysis (cf. Collins

1995:41). The linguist labeling experimental or corpus data with respect to these

categories of givenness must try to estimate what the speaker was assuming about

the hearer’s knowledge state at the time of the utterance. In other words, they must

make an assumption about what the speaker was assuming about what the hearer

was thinking.

With respect to my studies, when I refer to an entity as ‘given’, I mean the

following: a referent that has been mentioned explicitly (and repeatedly)

in the immediately preceding discourse. I do not mean to assert that the

speakers assume anything about the hearers’ thinking with respect to that entity. As

discussed in Section 1.5, it is theoretically important whether given (i.e., linguistically

copresent) entities have a special status in the mind of the speaker and whether the

speaker assumes they have such a status in the mind of the addressee. For this

reason, it is especially important to separate givenness in terms of cognitive status

from givenness in terms of linguistic (or even physical) copresence.

Orthogonal to the question of what “givenness” means is the question of whether

givenness is a binary distinction. Some argue that it is (e.g., Chafe 1976), others

use three or more categories of givenness (e.g., Prince 1992; Birner 2006), and still

others posit a givenness/accessibility hierarchy (e.g., Givón 1984; Gundel et al. 1993;

Ariel 2001) or other gradable notions of givenness. For example, within the Prague

School framework and the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective, Jan Firbas (e.g.,


1964, 1966, 1983) defended the idea that sentence elements carry (and are ordered

according to) a degree of “communicative dynamism,” which is “the extent to which

the sentence element contributes to the development of the communication, to which,

as it were, it ‘pushes’ the communication forward” (Firbas 1966:240). This notion can

be thought of as resulting in a type of discourse status hierarchy. As Firbas pointed

out, information that is new to the discourse carries a higher degree of communicative

dynamism than information that has already been introduced (e.g., Firbas 1964:270).

The claims made in this dissertation do not depend crucially on whether or not

givenness is gradable. Because the discourse context is carefully controlled, either the

referent for one of the postverbal arguments is mentioned the same number of times

and in the same way within a given study or not at all. Nevertheless, the number

of mentions does vary somewhat between studies. The degree of givenness, then, in

terms of the number of mentions might be relevant to the results.

Though there is some child language research on information structure and word

order, most work on the effects of givenness on childhood linguistic choices has an-

alyzed the types of referring expressions children use (e.g., pronoun, definite NP,

indefinite NP). This work largely ignores the syntactic context in which these refer-

ring expressions occur or analyzes the syntactic ordering separately. Overall, there

is very little work that systematically considers associations between word order and

referring expressions (for a few exceptions, see Karmiloff-Smith 1980; Hickmann et al.

1996; Prat-Sala & Hahn 2007; de Marneffe et al. Submitted). The next few subsec-

tions provide an overview of studies that address the effects of givenness on child

referring expressions and word order.

1.4.1 Referring expressions

The influence of givenness on referring expressions is well known. Definite NPs or

pronouns tend to refer to given information and indefinite NPs tend to refer to new


information (e.g.,Chafe 1976; Clark & Haviland 1977; Levelt 1989; Ariel 2001). But

the precise conditions under which a particular type of referring expression is chosen

are complex and involve many more factors than simply whether the information was

mentioned in the prior discourse (see discussions in Brown 1973:340-356; Hickmann

2003:Ch. 5). The age at which children master this system is a matter of debate.

Emslie & Stevenson (1981) argued that this mastery is evidenced by age 3 (see also

MacWhinney & Bates 1978), but Kail & Hickmann (1992) and Hickmann et al. (1995)

found errors in the choice of referring expressions as late as age 9. As discussed at

length in Hickmann (2003), the disparity across studies regarding age of acquisition

can be largely attributed to methodological differences, such as the type of stimuli

used (e.g., filmed vignettes vs. picture books) and whether both interlocutors were

jointly attending to the stimuli (see also Kail & Hickmann 1992; Hickmann et al.

1995; Hickmann 2004).

Across studies, however, one recurring question is whether children take the ad-

dressee’s perspective into account when choosing referring expressions. Brown (1973)

observed that young children are prone to making ‘egocentric’ errors with referring

expressions. When a referent is familiar to the child but unfamiliar to the addressee,

the child will often use a definite referring expression (signaling familiarity to the

addressee) rather than an indefinite one as in the examples in (20) taken from Brown

(1973:353).

(20) a. Sarah: The cat’s dead.

Mother: What cat?

b. Sarah: I want to open the door.

Mother: What door?


This type of error has also been reported in numerous elicited production studies

(e.g., Maratsos 1974; Warden 1976; Power & Dal Martello 1986; but cf. Emslie &

Stevenson 1981).

While reports of ‘egocentric’ errors cast some doubt on the ability of young children

to take the perspective of the addressee into account when choosing between multiple

means of expressing the same referential content, they do not warrant the conclusion

that discourse fails to influence children’s choice of referring expressions. The children

in these studies showed appropriate (although not error-free) differentiation in their

use of definiteness marking (see Power & Dal Martello 1986). For example, when told

a story introducing a particular character (e.g., “Once there was someone who wanted

to have an animal. . . . He saw two animals, a frog and a turtle. . . ”), children as young

as 3 subsequently referred to the given character using a definite NP (rather than an

indefinite one) 83% of the time (Maratsos 1974). And Campbell et al. (2000) found

that young children (aged 2;6 and 3;6) were more likely to use pronouns or ellipsis

when the referent was mentioned in prior discourse. Similar findings were reported

by Matthews et al. (2006) and Serratrice (2008) for preschool children (aged 3-5).

Thus, while the work of Maya Hickmann and her colleagues has repeatedly shown

that adult-like use of referring expressions in connected discourse is not fully attained

until well after preschool, there is converging evidence that preschool children are sen-

sitive to givenness in discourse and exploit that sensitivity in their choice of referring

expressions.

1.4.2 Word order

The effects of givenness on word order are less well reported and even less clear than

those for referring expressions. Most of this work concerns the choice of grammatical

subject, often in elicited narratives. For example, in a story elicitation task, Karmiloff-

Smith (1980) found that children did not choose the subject of their sentences based


on prior discourse until around age 5. Work on lengthier child narratives claims an

absence of discourse-motivated word order choices until age 7 or later (Hickmann

et al. 1996; Hickmann 1997; Hickmann & Hendriks 1999). And in a cross-linguistic

developmental study of givenness, MacWhinney & Bates (1978) found that “initial-

ization” of nouns during a picture description task was not related to givenness in the

speech of children (or adults!).

Other work, however, indicates that children are sensitive to properties of the dis-

course and that this knowledge affects their comprehension and production. Song &

Fisher (2005, 2007) found that children as young as 2;6 expect discourse prominent

referents to be sentential subjects (but cf. Arnold et al. 2007). Also, Snow (1979:173)

noted that early multiword constructions by children learning Dutch can be charac-

terized as sentences in which the most topical information (e.g., given information)

proceeds less topical information.

A few elicited production studies have also shown effects of discourse on word

order (Braine et al. 1990; Brooks et al. 1999; Prat-Sala & Hahn 2007, see also Turner

& Rommetveit 1968). Braine et al. (1990) tested English-speaking children (aged 2

and 4) and adults on their use of three verb types: (a) fixed transitivity verbs (either

transitive or intransitive), (b) optionally transitive verbs, and (c) novel verbs. The

experimenter (or the child) acted out the target event, and event descriptions were

elicited via the prompts in (21).5

(21) Example stimulus: Experimenter flips a spoon by hitting it on one end.

a. Agent-given: What am I doing?

b. Patient-given: What is the spoon doing?

c. Open question: What’s happening?

5The agent and patient labels used here are the labels used by Braine and his colleagues.


Braine and his colleagues found that children (of both ages) made discourse-motivated

syntactic choices. For all three verb types, children were most likely to use an agent-

subject (causative) sentence when the agent was given (e.g., You’re VERB-ing the

spoon.) and most likely to use a patient-subject (inchoative) sentence when the

patient was given (e.g., The spoon is VERB-ing.). The results for the adult data

were similar, except that adults (as expected) did not show any alternations with

fixed transitivity verbs. Braine et al. (1990:338) concluded that:

[D]iscourse pressure can cause children to use canonical sentence schemas

to supply argument structures that fit the needs of the discourse frame,

even when the verbs are very familiar and the argument structures are

not sanctioned by the lexical entry. [. . . ] In effect, there is competition

for control of the response between the lexical entry and the canonical

sentence schema that fits the needed discourse frame.

This study and a similar study by Brooks et al. (1999) provide convincing evidence

that discourse can influence word order before age 5. But do the effects of discourse

in these studies reflect a general preference to order given information before new

information or a more specific preference to use prominent discourse participants as

sentential subjects?

A few additional studies have argued that discourse/pragmatics plays a role in

child word order. But these studies, mostly on the acquisition of Italian, argue for

an early new-before-given strategy. Fava (1978) analyzed longitudinal tape-recorded

data from six children learning a dialect of Italian. The children were recorded once a

week for a year starting at the age of 1;6. Fava reported that children used VS orders

(VS, VOS, VSO) in the first stages of their development and SV orders (inclucing

SV and SVO) later. She attributed this finding to an early tendency to position new

information before given information, though she offered no systematic analysis of the


information structure of these utterances. According to Fava, “Very often the word, or

words conveying the most information and which are firstly selected [=mentioned first]

by the child are not part of the background [the] child and adult have in common” (p.

518). Fava also suggested that a tendency to use “comment-topic” order (new-before-

given) explains early choices between VSO and VOS structures, and that children used

“topic-comment” order (given-before-new) as a repair strategy when the comment-

topic utterances were not understood.

In another longitudinal study of children learning Italian, Bates (1976) also an-

alyzed early orderings of the subject, verb, and object. For the two children Bates

studied, Claudia and Francesco, she found that in the earlier transcripts (viz. Claudia:

1;3-1;9; Francesco 1;4-2;0), “there is actually a statistical preference for subject-final

constructions” (p. 188).6 Bates provided very little information about the types

of arguments the children used as subjects and objects during this period, though

she mentioned that both children referred to the speaker and addressee with proper

names, rather than first and second person pronouns (see Bates 1976:196). Conse-

quently, most of the subjects and objects were probably proper names and lexical

NPs, though the children may have also used some third person pronouns.

Bates also attributed this early subject-final strategy to an early tendency to or-

der new information before old information. One explanation offered for this is that

children “[extend] the old figure-ground strategy by blurting out the new or most in-

teresting information first, and adding other information on as a sort of afterthought,

until [they run] out of processing space” (p. 160). In other words, young children

may use an attention-based “first-things-first” strategy (see Gundel 1988:229). Ac-

cording to Bates, around MLU 3.0, both children began to alternate more between

a subject-final and a subject-first strategy. This was also about the time when they6The following utterance types were included in this analysis: SV, VS, OV, VO, SO, OS, V only,

SVO, SOV, OVS, OSV, VSO, VOS. See Bates (1976:185–200) for details.


Child Subject-before-object Object-before-subject

Claudia 9 SVO 6 OSV6 VSO 1 VOS

Subotal 15 7

Francesco 8 SVO 10 OSV4 VSO 11 VOS

Subotal 12 21

Total 27 28

Table 1.2: Bates 1976: Summary of Claudio and Francesco’s early SO and OS pro-ductions.

began using first and second person pronouns, so the types of arguments the children

produced may have played a role in these early syntactic choices.

A closer look at Bates’ data from the period when the children purportedly pre-

ferred a subject-final strategy, however, reveals that this pattern is not clearly ev-

idenced when it comes to the relative ordering of arguments. A summary of the

data that involve a verb and two nominal arguments from the periods mentioned

above is given in Table 1.2. Claudia produced more SO utterances and Francesco

more OS utterances. Also, the overall count of these utterances is very low, so it is

difficult to draw firm conclusions from these data. While these children may have

more subject-final utterances in this stage of development than later, the data do not

provide compelling evidence for a new-before-given strategy for the relative ordering

of sentential arguments. Also, though it is generally fair to assume that the subject

will be given information relative to the object, Bates did not provide any informa-

tion about the actual discourse status of these arguments. Overall, then, evidence

from spontaneous speech data for a new-before-given strategy in early multi-argument

productions is inconclusive at best.


To my knowledge, the only experimental work that was specifically designed to test

whether children observe given-before-new ordering is Narasimhan & Dimroth (2008).

These researchers investigated conjunct ordering by German-speaking children (aged

3 and 5) and adults. Participants saw an object (e.g., an egg) in a transparent,

round container, and an experimenter who could not see the object asked, Was ist da

drin? (‘What’s in there?’). After participants labeled the object, they were shown

two objects in the container, the previous object (the egg) and a new object (e.g., a

bed). The experimenter then repeated the question (Was ist da drin? ). Narasimhan

& Dimroth found that children tended to label the two objects with new-before-

given ordering (bed and egg), while adults preferred given-before-new ordering (egg

and bed). Narasimhan & Dimroth speculated that this difference in child and adult

responses might reflect a bias that young children have to focus on novel entities and

events (see Bates 1976). Despite the fact that adults still preferred given-before-new

ordering, it is questionable whether givenness should affect conjunct ordering in the

same way it affects argument ordering (see Bock & Warren 1985). I will return to

these results in more detail in Chapter 5.

Locative alternation

Most work on the acquisition of locative alternation has focused on the lexical seman-

tic properties that purportedly drive the alternation (see §1.2.1). Very little has been

said about potential effects of information status on this alternation, though Bower-

man (1982) argued that word-order errors as in (15) are not motivated by discourse

pressure (i.e., pressure to use given-before-new ordering) until age 5 or later.

Nevertheless, Gropen’s (1989) data suggest that information structure may, in

fact, play a role in early construction choices with locative verbs. Gropen systemati-

cally varied discourse status by mentioning either the locatum or the location in

the prompt (see Gropen 1989:36; italics indicate prosodic stress):


(22) Example stimulus: Three panel drawing of a woman filling a glass with water

a. Locatum-given: Point to the glass ! . . . Say glass ! . . . Say filling ! . . .What

is the woman doing to the glass?

b. Location-given: Point to the water ! . . . Say water ! . . . Say filling !

. . .What is the woman doing to the water?

Gropen was not interested in the development of discourse sensitivity per se, but “used

the pragmatics of the query in order to flush out the range of possible forms that a

verb can take” [emphasis in original] (Gropen 1989:36). Gropen essentially assumed

that children would use given-before-new as long as the child’s grammar permitted

the relevant construction.

Overall, discourse seems to have played some role in Gropen’s data, but the results

were far from conclusive. Gropen used ANOVAs to test the effect of question type

on each verb individually. For the non-alternating verbs (pour, dump, fill), only the

‘incorrect’ forms were analyzed (see 23-24).7

(23) location-objects with locatum-object verbs

a. *He poured the bucket with paint.

b. *She dumped the table with play-dough.

(24) locatum-object with location-object verb

*She filled paint into the bucket.

These analyses only showed a significant effect of question type for dump: There were

more erroneous location-object responses (23b) when the location was given than

when the locatum was given (i.e., given-before-new ordering). For the alternating

verbs (empty, stuff, splash), all responses (including adult responses) were included

in the analyses. For each of these verbs, there was a main effect of question type.

7These examples were constructed based on Gropen’s experimental stimuli.


In each case, the given entity was more likely to be the direct object (again, given-

before-new).

Gropen also tested for interactions between question type and age. Two verbs,

splash and fill, showed this interaction. For splash, question type influenced syntactic

choices (again, given-before-new) for the older children (4;6-5;11) and adults but not

for the younger children (2;6-4;5). For fill, the older children, but not the younger

ones, unexpectedly produced more locatum-objects when the location was given

(new-before-given). Gropen (1989:43) concluded,

We have no explanation for why the oldest children flouted the discourse

function of locative forms; however, we note that, for every group of sub-

jects except the oldest child group, the query which treated the identity

of the content [= locatum] as old information was more successful in

eliciting content-locative forms (though not significantly so according to

post-hoc t-tests). [emphasis in original]

In three studies with novel verbs (Experiments 3-6), Gropen found the predicted

effect of question type, but did not report any age related differences or interactions

between age and question type. Also, there was no control condition with respect to

discourse (all prompts were either locatum- or location-given). Thus, the effect of

discourse in one condition over another is impossible to assess. While Gropen’s results

seem promising, they leave open the question of how and when discourse sensitivity

is reflected in word order.8

8Gropen’s results are also problematic because the form of the prompt (viz. What was the woman

doing to the glass? ) highlights the affectedness of the mentioned object. Recall that Gropen’s

primary goal was to assess how object affectedness influences construction choice. The question is

whether Gropen’s findings reflect discourse sensitivity or an attempt to realize the most affected

entity as the object.


Dative alternation

There are a few production studies that test the effects of discourse on children’s

ordering of postverbal arguments in dative constructions (viz. Gropen et al. 1989;

Snyder 2003; de Marneffe et al. Submitted). For example, in a novel verb experiment

with children aged 6;3-8;6, Gropen et al. (1989) varied the discourse status of the

theme and recipient in a manipulation similar to the one in the locative alternation

research mentioned above. Children were taught a novel verb of transfer in either

a prepositional or a double-object dative and asked questions that mentioned one

postverbal argument or the other (cf. 22):

(25) Example stimulus: Experimenter transferred a ball to a toy mouse.

a. Theme-given: Can you tell me what I’m doing with the ball?

b. Recipient-given: Can you tell me what I’m doing with the mouse?

Question type significantly affected construction choice, but only when the child used

a construction that was not modeled by the experimenter. When prepositional datives

were modeled (e.g., I’m mooping the ball to the mouse.), children produced double-

object datives (e.g., You’re mooping the mouse the ball.) more for recipient-given

questions (44%) than for theme-given questions (17%). When double-object datives

were modeled (e.g., I’m mooping the mouse the ball.), children produced prepositional

datives (e.g., You’re mooping the ball to the mouse.) more for theme-given questions

(83%) than for recipient-given questions (55%). In other words, productive uses

of dative constructions reflected a bias for given-before-new ordering. When children

used the construction that was modeled, there was no effect of question type (i.e., no

effect of givenness). Gropen et al. concluded that, “the salience of the construction in

which the verb was taught overshadowed any pragmatic effects of what was focused

in the query” (p. 232).


Gropen’s results with novel dative verbs indicate that givenness can, under cer-

tain circumstances, influence syntactic choices in the speech of school-aged children.

Whether these results would generalize to familiar verbs and/or to younger children is

unclear. And as with the locative alternation studies, because there was not a neutral

discourse condition, there is no baseline with which to compare the discourse effects.

Again, Gropen et al. were not primarily interested in discourse factors, and they did

not consider the implications of discourse effects for the semantic and morphological

constraints they proposed.

In addition to Gropen’s work, two corpus studies have considered the role of in-

formation structure in dative alternations in child speech. Snyder (2003) analyzed

spontaneous uses of three alternating dative verbs (viz. give, take, bring) and bene-

factive uses of the verb make in the speech of children aged 3;3-8;1. These data were

extracted from a corpus of recorded caregiver-child and child-child interactions. Sny-

der excluded constructions with pronominal postverbal arguments to “avoid pesky

questions of cliticization” (p. 52). Her dataset consisted of 304 dative/benefactive

constructions involving two lexical postverbal arguments. Snyder found that heavier

postverbal arguments (as measured in syllables) tended to appear in final position.

Across verbs, age groups did not differ significantly with respect to this, though for

the verb give, older children were apparently more likely to place heavier arguments

last (though perhaps not statistically so). Since heaviness tends to be correlated with

information status (e.g., Ariel 2001), this finding may reflect a general tendency to

order given information before new information.

In a separate analysis, Snyder tested whether hearer-new recipients were (cate-

gorically) preferred in final position—a pattern she found in corpus data from adult

English speakers (see Snyder 2003:24). Snyder defined hearer-newness as “whether

the hearer [can] plausibly be assumed to be familiar with the NP” (p. 23), but she

offered no details about her coding of hearer-new information. This contrasts with


discourse-newness, which relates strictly to whether the entity is mentioned in the

discourse (Prince 1992; see discussion above). Snyder found that children aged 3-4

positioned hearer-new recipients in final position (NP PP) only about 20% of the

time, while children aged 5-6 did so about 70% of the time and those aged 7-8 about

80% of the time.

From this analysis, Snyder concluded that “children as old as seven or eight are

beginning to use information status in exactly the same way that adults do, while

very young children do not appear to use it at all.” Snyder did not report the choice

of construction based on the relative newness of the recipient with respect to the

theme, or the frequency of hearer-new recipients by age group, nor did she pro-

vide any statistical analysis of these data. Given these missing elements, we cannot

take these data as strong evidence against the notion that children aged 3-4 use

given-before-new ordering for postverbal arguments of alternating dative verbs. Also,

because Snyder only considered hearer-newness (and did not offer criteria for coding

this factor), these data do not allow us to assess the effects of discourse status on

early syntactic choices.

Using data from the childes database, de Marneffe et al. (Submitted) also con-

sidered whether discourse influences dative syntax. Based on a model of adult dative

alternation from Bresnan et al. (2007), they developed a multi-factor analysis of da-

tive alternation in both child speech (children aged 2-5) and CDS. In Bresnan et al.’s

(2007) model, givenness of the theme and the recipient were significant predictors

of adult construction choice, as were the related factors of pronominality, length, and

definiteness. These factors each made a significant independent contribution to the

model and were harmonically aligned (Aissen 1999)—referents that were discourse

given, pronominal, shorter, and definite tended to precede referents that were dis-

course new, lexical, longer, and indefinite. De Marneffe et al.’s work yielded a very

similar model for adult speech to children. In this model, pronominality and length


of the theme and recipient were significant predictors as was givenness of the

theme, though not givenness of the recipient. They did not discuss why recip-

ient givenness was not significant in the CDS model, but perhaps there was not

enough variation in this feature to reliably predict a difference in construction choice

(e.g., because recipients were mostly given).

Importantly, the child and CDS models were also quite similar, except that theme

givenness (the least significant factor in the CDS model) was non-significant in the

child model. Can we conclude from this that givenness does not affect child dative

constructions? The child model did show that pronominality of the theme and of the

recipient were important predictors of construction choice. Children mostly used

pronouns for given entities, though they occasionally used them for new referents

as well. De Marneffe et al. suggested that, “the effect of givenness on children’s

dative choices may be masked by the larger proportion of cases where the influence

of givenness and pronominality lead towards different constructions” (p. 20).

One reason that givenness may not have been significant in the child model is

that givenness was coded in the same way in the child and adult data. A referent was

counted as given if there was a coreferential expression in the previous 10 turns of

the dialogue. But because children have a more limited memory and attention span

than adults, this criterion may be too inclusive. Perhaps givenness would indepen-

dently contribute to the model if fewer turns were considered. Another possibility

is that most themes and recipients in child speech are given. So again, there

may not be enough variability in givenness for the model to detect a robust effect.

In essence, while previous work has furthered our understanding of early use of the

dative alternation, the extent to which givenness influences child datives remains an

open question.


1.5 Accounting for given-before-new ordering

As mentioned above, there is little agreement as to whether children use word order to

mark givenness. There is also little consensus about why we should (or should not)

expect children to prefer given-before-new ordering. This question is an especially

thorny one because the potential sources for this ordering phenomenon may well

be interrelated. In this section, I outline a few potential explanations for differential

ordering of given and new information in child speech: (i) addressee needs, (ii) speaker

needs, and (iii) distribution in the input. It is surely no accident that these three

notions might each provide a suitable account for the selfsame phenomenon. For

example, are some patterns more frequent because they are easier to produce (or

comprehend), or are they easier to produce (or comprehend) because children have

more experience with them, or both? We know that children recruit a wide range of

knowledge to learn a language; perhaps considerations of communication, processing

and frequency all contribute to given-before-new order. While it may be impossible

to fully tease apart the types of accounts presented here, this dissertation should yield

insights into the sources of discourse-motivated word order.

1.5.1 Addressee-based accounts

Children might use given-before-new ordering to be cooperative communication part-

ners. As Wasow (2002:62) noted, “Just as the punch line naturally comes at the end

of a joke, it makes sense for speakers to lay the groundwork first and save the high-

light of an utterance for last.” By placing given information before new information,

speakers link what has been said to what will be said and, thus, make the discourse

more coherent and easier to comprehend (see Arnold et al. 2000). When speakers

facilitate comprehension in this way, they are abiding by what Clark & Haviland

(1977:9) referred to as the Given–New Contract:

1.5. ACCOUNTING FOR GIVEN-BEFORE-NEW ORDERING 35

(26) Given–New Contract: Try to construct the given and new information of each

utterance in context (a) so that the addressee is able to compute from memory

the unique antecedent that was intended for the given information, and (b) so

that he will not already have the new information attached to that antecedent.

Because addressees need to retrieve the given information from memory (e.g., find the

referent of a pronouns) and then attach the new information to it, “it is optimal to take

in the given information before the new information; otherwise, they have to hold the

new information temporarily while they search for the antecedent to which it is to be

attached” (Clark & Haviland 1977:259). So on an addressee-based account, children

should use given-before-new ordering to facilitate the addressee’s comprehension.

Determining whether speakers adjust their production to aid comprehension or

for more egoistic reasons is notoriously difficult, but recent studies of both adult

and child production provide compelling evidence that the background knowledge

or perspective of the addressee influences language production. For example, Galati

& Brennan (2010) found that adults attenuate their utterances more when retelling

a story to someone who they told it to previously than when retelling it to a new

addressee. Also, in a communication task, Nadig & Sedivy (2002) found that five-

and six-year-olds use adjectival modification differently depending on whether their

interlocutor could see the same set of items in the child’s view. Children provide ad-

jectival modification more often when it is necessary to uniquely identify a referent in

common ground than when it is necessary only from their own privileged perspective.

Whether preschool children have the cognitive and/or linguistic skills needed to

abide by the Given–New Contract is a matter of debate (see Saylor et al. 2006). Yet

young children are apparently aware of what information is new (or at least relevant)

for their interlocutor, and they exploit this knowledge for successful communication

(see discussion and references in Clark 2009). O’Neill (1996) found that when two-

year-olds request a hidden object, they provide more information when the parent


was absent during the hiding event than when the parent was present (see also O’Neill

2005; Saylor et al. 2006). Also, research on children in the one-word stage suggests

that early one-word utterances express new information (e.g., Bates 1976; Greenfield

1979). Clark & Bernicot (2008) also argued that young children (aged 2;3 and 3;6)

are sensitive to the status of information in the discourse. They showed that two-

year-olds repeated new information from the previous utterance and signaled (via

this repetition) that they had attended to what was new and now regard it as shared

information (i.e., information in common ground). They also found that three-year-

olds, after repeating the new information, tended to add new information of their own

to the discourse (see also Allen 2000). In effect, these studies suggest that by age 2 or

3, children are capable of adjusting their utterances to better suit the needs of their

interlocutor. Thus, we might reasonably expect preschoolers to use given-before-new

ordering for the benefit of the addressee.

Another way to conceptualize an addressee-based account is to think of given-

before-new ordering as a strategy to convey a particular ‘perspective’ on an event.

As Clark (1990:1203) noted, “children must learn the form-meaning combinations

and also how each can be used to convey a specific perspective.” Consider again the

sentences in (1), repeated here:

(27) a. She gave the hat to the man.

b. She gave the man the hat.

While these two sentences might be used to describe the same event, they arguably

convey two different perspectives on the event. If asked, What did Rachel do with the

hat?, (27a) would be a more natural response than (27b). This is because (27a), which

highlights the fate of the hat, is more consistent with the addressee’s focus of atten-

tion. Previous work has shown that preschool children are able to convey multiple

perspectives on an event (e.g., Clark 1990; Clark 1997; Narasimhan & Gullberg 2006),

1.5. ACCOUNTING FOR GIVEN-BEFORE-NEW ORDERING 37

but the full range of linguistic devices used to convey perspective may not develop

until quite late (see Hornby 1971; Karmiloff-Smith 1980; Hickmann 1997; Hickmann

& Hendriks 1999; Arnold et al. 2007).

1.5.2 Speaker-based accounts

Alternatively, speakers might prefer given-before-new ordering, not for the sake of the

addressee, but because this sequence is easier to produce. Since language production

proceeds incrementally and speakers construct sentences on the fly (e.g., Levelt 1989;

Clark & Wasow 1998), speakers might delay the production of certain parts of a

sentence because those parts require extra time to plan. The idea is that given

information should take less time to plan (and produce) than new information and

should, therefore, be mentioned earlier. Two related notions are important here—

accessibility and length. Given referents are more accessible than new referents. In

other words, when a referent has just been mentioned, it is easier to retrieve from

memory (see Bock & Irwin 1980). Items that are retrieved faster can then be processed

faster, and thus, produced earlier, all the while buying time to plan the more difficult

parts (Bock & Irwin 1980; Bock & Warren 1985; Ferreira & Yoshita 2003). Given

referents also tend to be shorter than new referents (see, among others, Givón 1983;

Gundel et al. 1993; Arnold 1998; Ariel 2001). And shorter forms (e.g., pronouns) are

also generally mentioned before longer ones, again presumably because they require

less cognitive/articulatory effort or planning time on the part of the speaker (see

Hawkins 1994; Wasow 1997; Temperley 2007).

If given-before-new ordering is a speaker-based process, do speakers then prefer

this ordering because given information is more accessible, or because it is shorter,

or both? A few studies on adult production have tried to disentangle these highly

correlated features. Arnold et al. (2000) and Wasow (2002) argued that length and

accessibility both independently influence word order (see also Bresnan et al. 2007).


Arnold et al. (2000:50) concluded that “variation in constituent ordering cannot be

explained by a single factor, and that the speaker’s choice may be driven by different

considerations on different occasions, depending on which factors are strongest or

which needs are most pressing.” In general, speakers apparently prefer to save the

hardest parts of the sentence until the end, whether those bits are hardest because of

accessibility or length or some combination of these factors.

If adult given-before-new ordering is an effort to make production easier, we might

well expect to find similar effects in young children. Indeed, several researchers have

shown that there is continuity between the way children and adults process language

(e.g., Nadig & Sedivy 2002; Song & Fisher 2005; Song & Fisher 2007; Kidd et al.

2007; Bannard & Matthews 2008; McDaniel et al. 2010; Arnon 2010; de Marneffe

et al. Submitted).

1.5.3 Statistical-learning accounts

Yet another possibility is that children use given-before-new ordering because they

have learned this from the input. We know that distributional patterns in the input

play a crucial role in linguistic development (e.g., Saffran et al. 1996; Rowland et al.

2003; Diessel 2007; Smith et al. 2007). Children might observe, for example, that

postverbal arguments are generally arranged according to givenness. This seems

unlikely, though, because many verbs with two arguments never (or only rarely)

alternate, and for some of the alternating verbs, the alternation may be driven more

by semantic features than discourse ones (see §1.2). Overall, the data that provide

evidence for discourse-driven alternation of postverbal arguments are limited to a

relatively small set of verbs.

Alternatively, children might notice that subjects tend to refer to given infor-

mation (but see Arnold et al. 2007). They might then develop a general rule like

place given information as early as possible. In other words, children would notice

1.6. SUMMARY 39

this probabilistic tendency for subjects and generalize it broadly across grammatical

categories. As just noted, however, children receive considerable evidence from sen-

tences with multiple postverbal arguments that this rule does not hold, and any such

generalization might be quickly abandoned.

Some of the strongest evidence for distributional learning comes from findings that

child data mirror adult data on a verb-by-verb basis (e.g., de Villiers 1985; Naigles

& Hoff-Ginsberg 1998; Campbell & Tomasello 2001; Matthews et al. 2005; Chenu &

Jisa 2006). From this work, we might expect that children only use given-before-new

ordering with verbs that show sufficient evidence of this pattern in the input. Under

such an item-based account, verbs that do not alternate in the input would not be

expected to show variation in the child data.

Another way to learn given-before-new ordering from input might be to learn

(perhaps again on a verb-by-verb basis) that pronouns are often mentioned before

lexical nouns. If so, we should only see effects of givenness in the cases where one

postverbal argument is pronominal and the other is lexical. For the most part, these

distributional learning accounts would predict that older children will show more

effects of given-before-new ordering than younger children, because they have had

more experience with these patterns in the input.

1.6 Summary

In essence, this dissertation integrates two major lines of research—work on the acqui-

sition of argument structure and work on the acquisition of information structure—

and furthers our understanding of both by considering the relative order of postverbal

arguments in the speech of preschool children in contexts where both the discourse

context and situational context are highly controlled. Unlike previous studies, I also

carefully consider the interaction between word order and the form of the referring


expressions as well as other potential mediating effects like verb class and item-based

input patterns.

In Chapter 2, I report the results of two studies, one on preschooler’s use of

locative verbs, and a control study on adult usage. Although adults in this study

showed no tendency for given-before-new ordering, child syntactic choices were ro-

bustly influenced by the discourse. I also argue that type of referring expression,

semantic/conceptual biases, and patterns of distribution in the input are needed to

fully account for the children’s patterns of alternation.

In Chapter 3, I then turn to dative alternation verbs, reporting the results of an

elicited production study with four-year-old children and adults. In these studies, I

found that givenness influenced child and adult construction choices. Both groups

of speakers preferred to order given information before new information, though,

patterns in the input and/or semantic verb classes may have reduced this effect. The

child data also show particularly strong associations between givenness, word order,

and choice of referring expression.

In Chapter 4, I present a follow up study to this work on child datives, which

further assesses the roles of referring expressions, verb frequency, and semantic verb

class. Again, this study replicates the finding that givenness influences early syntactic

choices, but that a complex of other factors moderate this influence. This final study

also tests one of the underlying assumptions of the speaker-based explanation for

given-before-new ordering and suggests, preliminarily, that using given-before-new

ordering eases the processing load for preschool children.

Finally, Chapter 5 provides a summary of the major findings and and takes up

five major questions that I address throughout this dissertation:

(28) a. Do children use given-first or new-first ordering?

b. Are all verbs equally affected by givenness?

1.6. SUMMARY 41

c. Are all arguments equally affected by givenness?

d. Are givenness effects attributable to the type of referring expressions?

e. Why do children use given-before-new ordering?

In the end, this dissertation demonstrates that young children are able to incorporate

discourse cues into their production strategies, and it emphasizes the necessity of

taking multiple factors into account simultaneously in any study of child language

development.

Chapter 2

Study 1: Locative alternation

2.1 Introduction

Study 1 assesses the effects of discourse status on the realization of the locatum

and location arguments of locative verbs (see 29).

(29) a. She squirted the ketchup on the hotdog. (locatum-object variant)

b. She squirted the hotdog with ketchup. (location-object variant)

In particular, I address the following questions: (i) Do children (and adults) use given-

before-new ordering for these arguments? (ii) Can early argument structure errors

with non-alternating locative verbs be attributed to discourse pressure? and (iii) Do

age, verb frequency, and choice of referring expression moderate discourse effects?

I predict that children and adults will show sensitivity to discourse-givenness. I

expect this sensitivity to be manifested not only in their choice of referring expres-

sions (indefinite NP vs. definite NP vs. pronoun), but also in their choice of syntac-

tic constructions (locatum-object construction vs. location-object construction).

Specifically, I expect speakers of all ages to prefer given-before-new ordering; though

other pressures may, in some cases, override this preference. Adults should only show

42

2.2. STUDY 1A: CHILD LOCATIVES 43

given-before-new ordering with verbs that permit alternation. Similarly, if children

have learned that a particular verb never alternates (i.e., the verb’s argument struc-

ture is entrenched; see §1.3), givenness should not influence their syntactic choices

with that verb. But if children are unsure of a verb’s argument structure or have

learned that both constructions are acceptable, their patterns of alternation should

reflect the structure of the discourse (given-before-new). Thus, in the child data, error

patterns with non-alternating verbs and patterns of alternation with alternating verbs

should show given-before-new ordering. And as long as speakers use word order to

mark discourse status, I further predict that syntactic choices will align with choices

of referring expressions.

I first discuss the child data and then turn to the adult control study. Although the

methods for the child and adult studies were the same, I analyze the results separately

because of heterogeneity of variance in the two data sets. In the end, I argue that

preschoolers and adults show sensitivity to the discourse in their production choices.

In the child data, this sensitivity is reflected in both word order and choice of referring

expression. In the adult data, only referring expressions show discourse sensitivity.

Factors beyond discourse play a role in construction choice for both age groups, and

these factors likely nullified any potential for discourse-driven word order variation in

the adult data.

2.2 Study 1A: Child locatives

2.2.1 Methods

Participants. Participants for this study were 14 three-year-olds (2;10-3;11, M=3;6,

6 male/8 female) and 14 five-year-olds (4;11-5;7, M=5;3, 6 male/8 female). Nine

three-year-olds (2 female/7 male) and seven five-year-olds (3 female/4 male) were

44 CHAPTER 2. STUDY 1: LOCATIVE ALTERNATION

tested but replaced because they refused to complete the task (n=5), or they refused

to respond to instructions (n=2), or because of experimenter error (n=9). All of the

children were tested in a small quiet room at their nursery school.

Materials. The primary stimuli were 18 videotaped vignettes depicting transfer

events. There were three vignettes for each of the six verbs in (30).

(30) a. Alternating verbs: stuff, squirt

b. Locatum-object verbs: drop, pour

c. Location-object verbs: cover, fill

These verbs were chosen based on (i) their occurrence in young children’s spontaneous

speech in CHILDES, (ii) their membership in a given semantic verb class, (iii) how

clearly they could be depicted in filmed vignettes, and (iv) their use in previous

studies (especially Gropen et al. 1989).1 Unfortunately, the verbs that best met these

criteria were not well balanced for input frequency. I discuss the potential effects of

frequency below.

For each verb, the manner and endstate of the event were held constant across

the three vignettes to ensure that syntactic alternations were due to discourse effects

and not semantic factors (see §1.2.1). In the vignettes for the locatum-object verbs

(drop, pour) and the alternating verb squirt, the locations were only partially

affected. In those for the location-object verbs (cover, fill) and the alternating

verb stuff, the locations were holistically affected. Also, within each verb type, the

events for one verb involved a mass noun locatum (viz. for squirt, pour, fill) and1While fill is clearly regarded as a non-alternating locatum-object verb in the literature, adults

occasionally use fill with locatum-objects. Lumsden (1994:90) noted that this can happen in “cer-

tain special contexts.” To my knowledge, every study of English locative alternation in child speech

mentions that children make “errors” with this verb by using it in locatum-object constructions.

A large-scale corpus analysis of fill in adult speech might require us to revise the “error” label.


Vignette 1 Vignette 2 Vignette 3

Verb Locatum Location Locatum Location Locatum Location

stuff skirt box shirt bag sweater basketsquirt soap sponge ketchup hotdog water towel

drop spoon plate crayon paper toothbrush towelpour juice glass tea cup milk bowl

cover shirt shoe blanket pillow towel flowerfill sand cup dirt jar rice bowl

Table 2.1: Study 1: List of locatums and locations.

those for the other verb involved a count noun locatum (viz. for stuff, drop, cover ;

see Table 2.1).

Each critical-item vignette involved one human actor and four inanimate objects:

the locatum, the location, and an alternative locatum and location. The

alternative items were included to encourage complete responses (see Gropen et al.

1989; Gropen et al. 1991b). The actual locatum and location referents were

matched for number of syllables (e.g., shoe and shirt; towel and flower), so that

differences in length of lexical NPs would not influence construction choice (cf. §1.5.2).

The locatums and locations depicted in the vignettes are listed in Table 2.1. In

addition to these, I also constructed six filler vignettes. Each of these depicted a

human actor engaged in an intransitive activity (sitting, hiding, or running). In

total, there were 24 vignettes, and no individual actor or item appeared in more than

one vignette. Prior to viewing the vignettes, children saw a corresponding photograph

depicting the actor seated behind the items, which were arranged in random order.


Procedure. Each participant saw all 24 vignettes. To control for potential order

effects, 14 lists were created (one per subject in each age group). Each list contained

a unique pseudo-random order of vignettes.2

Discourse context was manipulated via three discourse conditions: one where the

locatum was mentioned in the prompt, one where the location was mentioned,

and one where neither of the postverbal arguments were mentioned (see 31). The

assignment of discourse condition to the three vignettes for each verb was random,

and new assignments were made for each of the 14 lists.

Before showing a vignette, I (the experimenter) showed the participant the cor-

responding photograph, labeled the items in the photograph, and primed the target

verb. After the participant repeated the verb, I played the vignette, established the

discourse context, and elicited the event description as in (31).

(31) Example prompts for Study 1

Vignette: female (agent) squirts ketchup (locatum) on hotdog (location)

E(xperimenter): Look, here’s a girl, and here’s a tart, and here’s a hotdog, and

here’s some mustard, and here’s some ketchup. Now I’m going to show you

a movie about squirting. Say squirting! [[Participant: squirting]] Yeah!

Now let’s watch! [[E shows vignette]] . . .

a. Control condition (agent-given):

E: Point to the girl! [[Participant points]] Yeah, there she is! What’s

the girl doing in that movie?2The order of vignettes per list was random with the restriction that the first vignette was always

a filler, and subsequent fillers were separated by at least two critical items. Vignettes depicting the

same verb were separated by at least two other vignettes, and at least one instance of each verb

occurred in each half of the list.


b. Locatum-given condition:

E: Point to the ketchup! [[Participant points]] Yeah, there it is! What’s

the girl doing with the ketchup?

c. Location-given condition:

E: Point to the hotdog! [[Participant points]] Yeah, there it is! What’s

the girl doing with the hotdog?

The pre-elicitation labeling procedure ensured that the participants could identify

each locatum and location. This procedure was carried out first (before the verb

prime and presentation of the vignette) so that the labeling would have the least

possible influence on the discourse status of the items. I elicited descriptions for the

six filler films in the same way as the critical trials in the control condition. Overall

all, 12 trials highlighted an animate actor, and 12 highlighted an inanimate object.

Finally, when children used pronouns to refer to the postverbal arguments, I

checked up on the referent of that pronoun in cases where only one postverbal argu-

ment was given. For example, if a child said, She squirted it, I then asked, Squirted

what?. In other words, I never assumed a priori that pronouns referred to given

information. To avoid giving children the impression that their utterances involving

pronouns were uninterpretable, I asked the question as though I simply had trouble

hearing what they said (e.g., by putting my hand behind my ear). When children

gave one pronominal postverbal argument and one lexical one (e.g. She squirted it

with ketchup.), I did not check up on the pronoun but considered it the referent of

the other postverbal argument.

Design. The study used a 2 x 3 x 6 design with (three-year-olds, five-year-olds), dis-

course condition (control, locatum-given, location-given), and verb (cover, drop,

fill, pour, squirt, stuff ) as independent factors.


Coding. Audio recordings were made of the experimental sessions and transcribed

for analysis. In the analysis, I only included initial responses to the elicitation prompt

that contained the target verb and at least one postverbal argument.3 The primary

coding was based on which postverbal argument was realized as the direct object.

For example, forms as in (32) were coded as locatum-object responses and those as

in (33) as location-object responses.

(32) a. She’s pouring some tea inside the cup. (S31, 5;5, control condition)

b. Pouring tea. (S10, 3;10, location-given condition)

(33) a. She’s covering the shoe with the shirt. (S27, 5;5, control condition)

b. She’s covering the shoe. (S21, 3;10, locatum-given condition)

Also, only the locatum and location were counted as postverbal arguments. In

two cases (see 34), the child mentioned one of these arguments plus an instrument.

(34) a. She’s dropping it [=crayon=locatum] with her hands like this.

(S24, 5;4, locatum-given condition)

b. Squirting it [=towel=location] with a squirt gun.

(S26, 5;7, location-given condition)

These were coded as responses with one postverbal argument. Specifically, (34a) was

coded as a locatum-object response with no location argument, and (34b) was

coded as a location-object response with no locatum argument.

I also coded for the form of the postverbal arguments. Noun phrases with definite

determiners (e.g., the cup, the milk) were coded as definite, and those with indefinite3When children failed to use the target verb, I prompted them to answer again (e.g., Yeah, but

remember this one is with filling! Can we do this one again and use the word filling? ). Also, when

children only produced the verb (e.g., Squirting.), I followed up by asking Squirting what?. The

responses to these additional prompts are discussed in §2.2.2.


determiners (e.g., a cup, some milk) or no determiner (e.g., milk) were coded as

indefinite. Recall, though, that half of the locatums were mass nouns. Definite and

indefinite determiners with mass nouns can be used to indicate quantity, rather than

discourse status (see Schwartz-Norman 1976:284–285; Jeffries & Willis 1984:720). For

example, she poured the milk may mean that she poured all of the milk, and may be

felicitous even if milk was not mentioned in prior discourse. In each of the vignettes

with mass noun locatums, only part of the mass was transferred to the location.

Potential complications due to this aspect of the vignettes are discussed below.

Analysis. I analyzed the data using mixed-effect logistic regression models with

the software package R (Baayen 2008). These regression models are well-suited for

language research, because they allow for the simultaneous evaluation of multiple

variables and permit generalization over individual speakers and items through the

inclusion of random effects for participants and items (Quené & Van den Bergh 2004;

Baayen 2008; Baayen et al. 2008; Jaeger 2008). As with ordinary logistic regression

models, mixed logit models predict the probability of a binary response and are,

therefore, appropriate for studying linguistic choices that involve two alternative ex-

pressions. These models have been used effectively to predict adult behavior with

dative alternation (Bresnan et al. 2007), genitive alternation (Hinrichs & Szmrec-

sanyi 2007), and the presence or absence of complementizers (Jaeger & Wasow 2006).

Recent work in acquisition has also benefited from mixed-effects logistic regression

modeling, including corpus work on dative alternation (de Marneffe et al. Submit-

ted) and experimental work on conjunct ordering (Narasimhan & Dimroth 2008) and

relative clause production and comprehension (Arnon 2010).


2.2.2 Results

Because each child (n=28) in this study saw all 18 items, the maximum number of

child responses was 504. Of these, only 252 (50%) met the inclusion criteria (viz.

initial responses that involve the target verb and at least one postverbal argument).

Of the 262 excluded responses, 245 (94%) involved the target verb and at least one

postverbal argument, but they were not the child’s initial response to the prompt. A

representative example of these non-initial (or prompted) data is given in (35).

(35) E: . . . There it is! What’s the boy doing with the shirt? (locatum-given)

Child (S32, 5;2): He’s putting it in a little container.

E: Uh-huh, great! Can you tell me with the word stuffing what he’s doing with

the shirt?

Child: He’s stuffing the shirt into a container.

The fact that only half of the responses met the inclusion criterion is not surprising

given that most of the events in this study could be felicitously described with the

verb put, which is one of the most frequent verbs in child speech (Laakso & Smith

2007). The decision to exclude the non-initial data responses from the final analysis

was based on two factors. First, the initial response to the prompt often altered

the discourse context. As in (35), children generally mentioned one or both of the

postverbal arguments in their initial responses, which caused those elements to be

given information, regardless of the discourse condition. Second, the syntactic struc-

ture used in the child’s initial response could have caused the child to persist in using

that same structure for the subsequent response.

In addition to these non-initial data, four other responses were excluded because

the child never used the target verb (see 36). In these cases, the verb used in place

of the target verb was always put.


(36) E: Yeah, there she is! What’s she doing in that movie? (control condition)

Child (S14, 5;4): She’s putting clothes in a basket.

E: Yeah! Can you use the word stuffing to tell me what she’s doing?

Child: She’s doing something because she is. . . something. . . She’s packing up

and she’s putting something in a basket!

Finally, I also excluded responses with the form V + PP (see 37). Unlike V + NP

responses, these responses were very rare (n=3). Also, the analyses presented below

are based on which argument was realized as the direct object, but these data are not

easily categorized as locatum- or location-object responses.

(37) a. She was pouring in a cup. (S32, 5;2, control condition)

b. Pouring into a glass. (S10, 3;10, locatum-given condition)

c. Squirting with the ketchup. (S22, 2;10 location-given condition)

In the analyses below, I consider only the responses that met the inclusion criteria.

Word order. To test the effects of givenness on child locative constructions, I fitted

a regression model using construction type (locatum-object vs. location-object)

as the binary outcome variable and discourse condition (control vs. locatum-given

vs. location-given) and age (three vs. five) as the main predictor variables. I in-

cluded the logged trial number (1-24) and the number of postverbal arguments (1

vs. 2) as control variables, and participants and verbs as random effects. I also tested

for interactions between the variables and dropped non-significant interactions from

the model. Because age and the random effect for participants were not significant, I

removed them as well. The results of the regression are presented in Table 2.2. Posi-

tive coefficients indicate a preference for locatum-object constructions, and negative

coefficients a preference for location-object constructions. Overall, the model fit

was good (C-statistic=0.97, Dxy=0.94, R2=0.92).


Factors Coefficient SE Odds P-valueLocatum-given condition 2.6608 0.7723 14.3077 0.000571 ***Location-given condition 0.3135 0.5844 1.3682 0.591652 n.s.Order -1.7246 0.5554 0.1782 0.001903 **No. of arguments (=2) -4.3613 2.8064 0.0128 0.120176 n.s.Order x No. of args. (=2) 2.6546 1.0777 14.2193 0.013766 *

Table 2.2: Study 1A: Results of model predicting locatum-object constructions.

Crucially, there was a significant main effect of discourse condition. Locatum-

object constructions were significantly more likely when the locatum was given than

in the control condition. There was, however, no significant difference between the

location-given condition and the control condition. Recall also that there was no

significant effect of age nor any interaction between age and discourse. As expected,

both child age groups tended to realize given arguments as the first object: three-year-

olds and five-year-olds used more locatum-object constructions when the locatum

was given (Figure 2.1).

The pattern of responses with respect to the discourse condition (viz. more locatum-

object when the locatum was given) was also consistent across responses with one-

and two-postverbal arguments (see Table 2.3). Responses with two postverbal argu-

ments were generally more likely to have locatum-objects, which may be due (at

least in part) to patterns of usage in the input (see Table 2.4). Importantly, though,

there was no significant main effect of the number of arguments and no interaction

between the number of arguments and the discourse condition.

Additionally, there was a significant effect of order (i.e., the logged trial number).

As the negative coefficient for order reveals, locatum-object responses were less

likely later in the experiment. This may be a simple effect of the randomization

process; by chance, there were more trials with location-object verbs toward the

end of the sessions. There was also a significant interaction between order and number


condition

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

control

locatum

location

3 yrs

control

locatum

location

5 yrs

Figure 2.1: Study 1A: Proportion of locatum-object constructions by age.

Discourse condition

N. of args. Control locatum location Totalone-arg. 14/31 (45%) 21/36 (58%) 13/39 (33%) 48/106 (45%)two-args. 35/43 (81%) 47/50 (94%) 45/53 (85%) 127/146 (87%)Total 49/74 (66%) 68/86 (79%) 58/92 (63%) 175/252 (69%)

Table 2.3: Study 1A: Proportion of responses with locatum-objects.


of arguments. Order influenced responses with one postverbal argument (given-first),

but not those with two.

Finally, the verbs were not equally subject to discourse pressure (see Figure 2.2).

Alternations were mainly found with fill, squirt, and stuff. Pour, drop, and cover

rarely alternated and instead showed their required argument structure. Importantly,

these patterns do not align perfectly with verb type; the two location-object verbs

(cover, fill) differ markedly from each other. Children were at ceiling with cover, but

produced a high proportion of locatum-object responses with fill (cf. Kim et al.

1999). As predicted, these error patterns reflect discourse pressure: locatum-object

constructions with fill were produced primarily when the locatum was given.

condition

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

control

locatum

location

drop (locatum-obj)

control

locatum

location

pour (locatum-obj)

control

locatum

location

cover (location-obj)

stuff (alternating) squirt (alternating)

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0fill (location-obj)

Figure 2.2: Study 1A: Proportion of locatum-object constructions by verb.


Word order and referring expressions. The data presented thus far do not

address whether locatum-givenness influences construction choice directly or indi-

rectly via the choice of referring expressions. As discussed in Chapter 1, an argument’s

givenness, length, and definiteness are often highly correlated. Compared to new ar-

guments, given arguments are more likely to be short and definite. Although the

stimuli for this study were designed so that lexical postverbal arguments would have

the same length in syllables (e.g., towel, flower), children often produced pronomi-

nal postverbal arguments (which are both short and definite). And when children

produced lexical postverbal arguments, those were sometimes definite and sometimes

indefinite. So can the effect of locatum-givenness be reduced to a pronoun-first

(short-first) and/or a definite-first strategy? Figure 2.3 gives the distribution of dif-

ferent types of referring expressions across given versus new arguments. Importantly,

givenness (given, new) and choice of referring expression (indefinite NP, definite NP,

pronoun) were highly correlated for locatums (Spearman’s r=0.57, p<0.0001) and

for locations (Spearman’s r=0.52, p<0.0001).4

4Because of the high correlations (collinearity) between givenness and choice of referring expres-

sion, building a statistical model with both factors is problematic. Such a model is also problematic

because the data set includes one- and two-argument responses. If we add the choice of referring

expression, then we must compare four “types” of referring expressions per postverbal argument:

indefinite NPs, definite NPs, pronouns, and non-overt arguments. But if one argument is non-overt,

then the other is always the direct object. So construction choice for that “type” of locatum or

location would be categorical, and categorical outcomes cannot be modeled in a probabilistic

analysis. We could instead recode the referring expressions, creating a factor with fewer levels (e.g.,

pronouns vs. others; definite expressions vs. others), but this would require grouping non-overt

arguments with another type (like lexical NPs or indefinite NPs). Given that argument ellipsis did

not pattern with the discourse, such a decision would be theoretically unmotivated. In this section,

I address the influence of referring expressions without appealing to a statistical model.


given locatums new locatums

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

indefinite NPsdefinite NPspronouns

given locations new locations

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0


Figure 2.3: Study 1A: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs. newlocatums (above) and locations (below).


Altogether, the children produced 150 given arguments. Nearly all of these were

definite (either pronouns or definite NPs). Only 5% (n=7) were realized as indefinite

nouns (see 38).

(38) a. E: What’s he doing with the milk? (locatum-given condition)

Child (S34, 5;1): He’s pouring some milk into a bowl.

b. E: What’s she doing with the pillow? (location-given condition)

Child (S34, 5;1): She’s covering a pillow so she could hide it from us.

Of the seven indefinite NPs for given information, three referred to mass noun lo-

catums as in (38a). Such uses are not necessarily infelicitous, because only part

of the locatum was transferred to the container (see §2.1). Perhaps children used

indefinites in these cases to indicate the partial nature of the transfer.5 The only

truly infelicitous uses of referring expressions for given arguments were the other four

cases, all of which involved indefinite NPs for given locations as in (38b).

Of the discourse-new arguments (n=249), 28% were realized as indefinite NPs,

61% as definite NPs, and 11% as pronouns. But the child and experimenter were

jointly attending to the stimuli (so all referents were all physically co-present). Con-

sequently, uses of definite NPs for these arguments were pragmatically acceptable.

The only pragmatically infelicitous uses of referring expressions for new information

were the occasional pronominal ones (n=28).

As shown in Figure 2.4, indefinite lexical NPs were about as likely to occur in the

direct object position as definite ones. Definite and indefinite locatums occurred

in locatum-object constructions around 85% of the time. Definite and indefinite

locations occurred in location-object constructions around 30% of the time. This

suggests that NP definiteness in itself was not a strong determinant of construction5Even when the locatum was new, there were more indefinite NPs for mass locatums (n=33)

than for count locatums (n=12).


choice. This may seem surprising given the robust correlation between givenness and

type of referring expression, but recall that definite NPs were produced for given

arguments and for new ones. The same was true of indefinite NPs, though indefinite

NPs for new information were extremely rare (n=6, 2 locatums/4 locations).

If locatum-givenness influenced construction choice directly (and not just by

influencing the choice of referring expression), we might find that definite NP lo-

catums for given information were more likely to appear in locatum-object con-

structions than those for new information. This was the case, at least to some ex-

tent. Of the 13 definite NP locatums for given information, all but one occurred in

locatum-object constructions (93%). Of the 57 definite NPs for new information, 47

(82%) occurred in locatum-object constructions. Although the difference in these

proportions is small, it offers some preliminary evidence that givenness influenced

construction choice independent of referring expressions.6

Pronominal arguments, on the other hand, were more likely than lexical ones to

appear in the direct-object position (i.e., short-first). Of the pronominal locatums

(n=76), all but two appeared in locatum-object constructions. The two uses of

oblique pronominal locatums were both for the non-alternating location-object

verb cover in the locatum-given condition (see 39).

(39) a. E: What’s she doing with the shirt? (locatum-given condition)

Child (S11, 3;10): She’s covering her shoe with it.

b. E: What’s he doing with the towel? (locatum-given condition)

Child (S28, 5;3): He’s covering the flower with it.6This difference did not emerge for locations. Definite NP locations for given information

(n=33) occurred in location-object constructions 33% of the time, and those for new information

(n=95) occurred in location-object constructions 34% of the time. Recall that, unlike locatum-

givenness, location-givenness was not a significant predictor of construction choice.


indefinite NP locatums definite NP locatums pronominal locatums

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0 locatum-obj.

location-obj.

indefinite NP locations definite NP locations pronominal locations

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0 locatum-obj.

location-obj.

Figure 2.4: Study 1A: Proportion of locatum- vs. location-object constructionsfor each type of locatum (above) and location (below).


Although most pronominal locatums referred to given information, there were some

(n=22, 29%) that referred to new information. All of these occurred in locatum-

object constructions (see 40).

(40) a. E: What’s he doing in that movie? (control condition)

Child (S14, 3;6): He’s stuffing it into the box.

b. E: What’s he doing with the towel? (location-given condition)

Child (S31, 5;5): Dropping it on a towel.

c. E: What’s she doing with the hotdog? (location-given condition)

Child (S23, 3;5): Squirting it on the hotdog.

Thus, locatum-pronouns showed a very strong tendency to appear in the first

postverbal position, regardless of givenness.

But pronominality itself did not fully determine syntactic choice. Only about half

(56%) of the pronominal locations were produced in location-object responses.

Almost all pronominal locations referred to given information (88%). There were

only six uses of pronominal locations for new information (see 41)—all but one in

location-object constructions. None of the responses in the child data contained

two pronominal postverbal arguments.

(41) a. E: What’s he doing with the spoon? (locatum-given condition)

Child (S23, 3;5): He dropped the spoon to it.

b. E: What’s he doing in that movie? (control condition)

Child (S12, 3;3): Filling it with rice.

Importantly, when pronominal locations occurred in locatum-object construc-

tions (i.e., in second position), it was mostly with the non-alternating locatum-

object verbs drop (n=8) and pour (n=8), though they also occurred with the two alter-

nating verbs, stuff (n=2) and squirt (n=2), and once with fill. Pronominal locations


in location-object responses were mostly with the non-alternating location-object

verb cover (n=14), though also with fill (n=7), squirt (n=5) and stuff (n=1). In the

end, the distribution of locatum- and location-pronouns across constructions and

verbs suggests that there was, indeed, a strong bias to realize the pronoun as the di-

rect object, except in cases where this choice would have led to a highly dispreferred

construction (e.g., location-object constructions with drop and pour).

Another way to approach the question of whether the effect of locatum-givenness

is reducible to pronominality is to consider cases in which both postverbal arguments

were lexical (n=128). While a regression on these data shows no effect of discourse

condition, some of the same discourse-sensitive patterns emerge. As shown in Figure

2.5, two of the three verbs that showed discourse-driven argument realization patterns

(stuff and fill) still show more Locatum-object responses with given locatums (cf.

Figure 2.2). Ultimately, the significant effect of locatum-givenness is not entirely

attributable to the fact that given locatums were more likely to be realized as

pronouns. It seems likely that locatum-givenness and locatum-pronominality both

have some independent influence on construction choice, but there is too much overlap

between them in these data to fully verify this claim.

2.2.3 Discussion

This study provides strong evidence that discourse-givenness influences early word

order choices. But givenness did not influence word order across the board. Some

verbs were influenced by givenness, while others were not. Givenness of the locatum

affected construction choice, but givenness of the location did not. Also, choice of

referring expression seems to have influenced the effects of givenness. This section

addresses each of these issues in turn.


condition

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

control

locatum

location

drop (locatum-obj)

control

locatum

location

pour (locatum-obj)

control

locatum

location



0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8


Figure 2.5: Study 1A: Proportion of locatum-object constructions in responses withlexical postverbal arguments.


Differences among verbs. The two alternating verbs (stuff, squirt) and the location-

object verb fill showed discourse-driven alternation patterns, but the location-

object verb cover and the two locatum-object verbs (pour, drop) did not. Verb type

alone cannot account for this finding, because the two location-object verbs showed

such different behavior. The semantic properties of the events also fail to account

for these results. For alternating locative verbs, the locatum-object construction is

generally associated with a “partitive” interpretation, and the location-object con-

struction with a “holistic” interpretation (see §1.2.1). But in this study, the manner

and end-state of the events were held constant by verb (see §2.2.1). The locations

were fully affected in the vignettes for stuff (and for fill and cover), and partially af-

fected in the vignettes for squirt (and for pour and drop). Thus, degree of affectedness

does not account for the different verb-based patterns.

Another possibility is that the differences are due to children’s prior experience

with the verbs. To estimate how much experience children have with these verbs,

I conducted a small corpus study of uses of these verbs in speech to seven children

in the CHILDES Database (MacWhinney 2000).7 The results are presented in Table

2.4. Importantly, the three verbs that showed no alternation in the experimental child

data (cover, drop, pour) are more than twice as frequent in CDS as the verbs that

showed discourse-sensitive alternation patterns. Also, children rarely (if ever) hear

the infelicitous variant of these non-alternating verbs. The location-object verbs7These seven corpora were the same ones used in de Marneffe et al. (Submitted): Brown corpus

(Adam), Brown (Sarah), Clark (Shem), Demetras1 (Trevor), Kuczaj (Abe), Sachs (Naomi), Suppes

(Nina). I use these to provide a basis of comparison with the corpus results in Study 2, which are

partially taken from the data extracted by de Marneffe and her colleagues. I extracted the locative

verbs using the CLAN tool, searching only for tokens labeled as verbs (in the morphology tier).

Mislabeled nouns were removed from the data, as was one figurative use of cover (viz. Don’t ya think

that about covers it? Mother to Sarah).


Locatum-object Location-object

Verb Verb type One-arg. Two-args. One-arg. Two-args. Total

stuff alternating 0 0 1 1 2squirt alternating 0 1 16 2 19fill location-obj. 0 0 10 4 14cover location-obj. 0 0 43 5 48drop locatum-obj. 86 15 0 0 101pour locatum-obj. 33 24 1 0 58

Table 2.4: CHILDES: Distribution of verbs in parental speech to 7 children.

only occurred with location-objects. There was only one instance of a locatum-

object verb in what could be construed as a ‘V + location’ construction (viz.,

Pour one more glass. Father to Abe), but here, glass is almost certainly a measure

phrase denoting the locatum (as in a glass of milk) rather than an actual location

argument. Additional examples from the corpora are given in (42) and (43).

(42) Parental Locatum-object constructions in CHILDES

a. Pour your own milk. (Mother to Naomi)

b. He dropped some beans. (Mother to Adam)

c. Okay, could you squirt some lemon in my tea please? (Mother to Nina)

(43) Parental Location-object constructions in CHILDES

a. I’m protecting myself against your maniac mother; she wants to squirt

me. (Father to Abe)

b. Lie down, Nomi, and I’ll cover you with the blanket. (Father to Naomi)

c. Because I stuffed it with meat. (Mother to Abe)

Given the results from naturalistic CDS, we can reasonably assume that the chil-

dren in my study already had enough exposure to the three non-alternating verbs

(cover, drop, and pour) to learn that they resist alternation. In other words, the


argument structure of these verbs was entrenched (see §1.3), so children performed at

ceiling and avoided discourse-motivated errors. But with verbs that children have very

little exposure to (and which are, consequently, non-entrenched), discourse-pressure

was able to motivate alternations, whether the verb allows alternation in adult speech

(squirt, stuff ) or not (fill).

The frequency distributions of these verbs further suggest that the givenness effects

were not due to item-based statistical learning. Discourse-sensitive ordering emerged

with precisely those verbs for which there is very little evidence in the input. Of

course, this does not eliminate the possibility that statistical learning is driving the

effects. Perhaps children learn that given information is positioned earlier in general

(e.g., by observing patterns with subject choice), and they apply this principle in

ordering postverbal arguments—unless they have had enough experience with a verb

to know that it prohibits alternation. In other words, children apply global ordering

preferences in production until they learn item-specific patterns that conflict with the

global ones. I address other potential accounts of givenness effects below.

Differences in locatum- and location-givenness. Another pressing question

is why construction choice was influenced by locatum-givenness, but not location-

givenness. One explanation may lie in the selection of verbs in this study. The

most extreme effect of locatum-givenness was for the verb fill (see Figure 2.2).

This is a low-frequency location-object verb, and previous work has shown that

children tend to (erroneously) use this verb in locatum-object constructions (see

Bowerman 1982; Gropen 1989; Kim et al. 1999). Perhaps the children in my study

had some rudimentary understanding that fill prefers/requires location-objects, but

they still had a relatively unstable representation of this verb’s argument structure.

When discourse pushed for a locatum-object response, children were, therefore,

less able to inhibit such a response than in other discourse conditions. This would


account for the fact that children made errors with this verb around 90% of the time

when the locatum was given, and about 30% of the time otherwise. Perhaps word

order is most susceptible to discourse pressure when the discourse favors an argument

structure that children have not yet fully learned to suppress. The non-alternating

locatum-object verbs in this study are both high-frequency in CDS, and the children

in my study were at ceiling with these verbs. Thus, to give location-givenness a fair

chance, it would have been best to include a low-frequency (and potentially otherwise

error-prone) locatum-object verb.

Another possible explanation is related to a bias to attend more to locatums

than locations. There was a systematic asymmetry between the locatums and

locations in this study. The locatums were always in motion, while the loca-

tions remained stationary. This may have boosted the overall prominence of the

locatums. As Fisher (2000:16) noted, children show “a basic predisposition to at-

tend to first movers in causal events” (cf. Dowty 1991). Studies on the use of novel

verbs of transfer have also suggested that children are more likely to attend to mov-

ing objects rather than stationary ones (Gentner 1978; Gropen 1989; 1991a, 1991b).

Of course, for these transfer events, it would generally be impractical to move the

location during the event. Thus, this asymmetry in the stimuli was not simply an

artifact of the experimental design.

Although this locatum advantage was equally present in all of the experimental

stimuli (regardless of discourse condition), the boosted non-linguistic prominence of

the locatum may have interacted in important ways with the discourse. If children

were predisposed to attend to locatums, then the locatum-given condition pro-

vided a cue consistent with this predisposition (yes, the locatum is more prominent),

while the location-given condition provided a conflicting cue (no, the location

is more prominent). Thus, when the cues were aligned, discourse succeeded in influ-

encing word order, but when the cues conflicted, the potential effect of discourse was


cancelled out, resulting in syntactic choices that were not significantly different from

the baseline (see the discussion of “cue clash” in de Marneffe et al. Submitted). This

account yields the prediction that boosting the visual salience of the location over

the locatum would yield a more robust discourse-effect for location givenness (see

Gropen 1989; Gropen et al. 1991b for suggestive evidence in this direction).

The idea that locatums are generally more prominent than locations also

receives some support from the pronoun data. Children were generally more likely to

pronominalize the locatum than the location and to to use pronominal locatums

for discourse-new information (see Figure 2.3). To the extent that pronouns are

used for contextually prominent referents, and not just discourse prominent ones

(see §1.5), the (over)use of pronominal locatums compared to locations suggests

that children did, indeed, consider the locatums to be more prominent than the

locations. While further research is necessary to fully understand the difference

between locatum and location-givenness, a number of factors (both linguistic and

non-linguistic) likely conspire together to effect this asymmetry.

The role of referring expressions. There were strong associations between given-

ness and the choice of referring expressions. Pronouns were mostly used for given

information, and indefinite NPs mostly for new information. This is consistent with

previous findings that young children use referring expressions to mark discourse in

a target-like way, though their choices are not entirely error-free (see §1.4.1). For

the present purposes, the choice of referring expression is especially important as it

relates to word order. De Marneffe et al. (Submitted) found that the pronominality

of the postverbal arguments of the dative verbs give and show was highly predic-

tive of child construction choice (see also Bresnan et al. 2007; Bresnan & Nikitina

2009; Bresnan & Ford 2010; Anttila et al. In press). Also, Hickmann et al. (1996:610)

argued that, at least from age 7 on, givenness is either not marked at all, or marked


via both word order (‘global markings’) and referring expressions (‘local markings’).

In particular, Hickmann and her colleagues observed that discourse-new NPs tend to

occur in postverbal position (e.g., in presentative constructions like, There’s a cat.),

but only if the NP is also marked for newness (e.g., with an indefinite article).

In the present study, there was no compelling evidence that NP definiteness played

an independent role in construction choice. Definite and indefinite NPs were approxi-

mately equally likely to occur in the direct-object position, but definite NPs referring

to given information were more likely to occur in the direct-object position than those

referring to new information.

Pronominality may have influenced the results, though. Nearly all locatum-

pronouns immediately followed the verb, whether given or new. On the other hand,

pronouns were far more likely to be used for given referents than for new ones, and

the data involving only lexical postverbal arguments exhibited the same discourse-

sensitive alternation patterns, though locatum-givenness did not reach significance

in these data.8 While givenness may primarily influence word order by first influencing

the choice of referring expressions (by increasing the rate of pronominalization), this

study provides preliminary evidence that both givenness and pronominality have an

independent effect on construction choice, consistent with the findings of Arnold

et al. (2000) for adult construction choice (see also Wasow 2002; de Marneffe et al.

Submitted).

Summary. Study 1A indicates that three- and five-year-olds are sensitive to dis-

course status and that discourse influences the order of postverbal arguments either8The patterns in the data with lexical postverbal arguments also suggest that the difference

between locatum- and location-givenness is not attributable to preponderance of locatum-

pronouns over location-pronouns. As shown in Figure 2.5, the location-given condition still

appears to have no effect construction choice.


directly (given-first), or indirectly through the choice of referring expressions (short-

first). This effect is verb-dependent, and is apparently blocked when the verb’s ar-

gument structure is entrenched. Also, the effect of givenness on word order is likely

influenced by the extra-linguistic prominence of the referents. I have argued that

the location-given condition failed to influence word order because the discourse

prominence of the location was in conflict with the contextual/conceptual promi-

nence of locatum. In the locatum-given condition, though, these two sources of

prominence aligned and discourse had a robust effect on word order.

But what mechanisms underlie this effect? Is the effect driven by addressee needs,

speaker needs, and/or statistical learning? Discourse-sensitive ordering is probably

not learned on a verb-by-verb basis from the input. If it were, discourse effects should

only emerge with verbs that show robust evidence of given-first ordering in the input,

but the effects found in this study were with very infrequent verbs, one of which does

not generally alternate in adult speech. At present, though, we cannot rule out the

possibility that discourse-sensitive word order choices were learned more globally from

the input (e.g., by observing that subjects are generally more given than objects).

Abstracting away from this possibility, do the current data decide between an

addressee- or a hearer-based account? This question is particularly difficult to ad-

dress, because both the speaker and the addressee were jointly attending to the stim-

uli. In one sense, then, it should be impossible to decide because the speaker and the

addressee shared the exact same background knowledge. To fairly assess whether chil-

dren accommodate to the addressee’s knowledge state or their own, the two knowledge

states would need to be readily distinguishable.

This important caveat aside, one aspect of the current study argues in favor of a

speaker-based account. As discussed in Chapter 1, addressee-based accounts claim

that speakers use given-before-new ordering to facilitate comprehension. In this study,

though, responses with one postverbal argument showed the same discourse effect as


those with two. The Given-New Contract does not straightforwardly apply to cases

where the given referent is realized, but the new one is not. In these cases, children

did not wait to mention the new information until the addressee had a chance to

retrieve the given information (see §1.5.1). They simply never mentioned the new

information.

In fact, it is not intuitively clear whether producing ‘verb + given information’

or ‘verb + new information’ would better facilitate comprehension. Considering the

following:

(44) E: . . .What did the girl do with the ketchup?

a. She squirted it/the ketchup. (verb + given information)

b. She squirted a/the hotdog. (verb + new information)

Although (44b) may be more informative than (44a) (especially under conditions

where knowledge of the event is not shared), both responses are easily comprehensible

and relevant to the discourse. In essence, the addressee-based approach accounts for

the data with two postverbal arguments, but does not fare as well with the one-

argument data.

A speaker-based approach, however, could readily account for discourse sensitive

ordering in both subsets of the data. The claim from this account is that given entities

are more accessible in memory, and, therefore, processed faster and produced earlier.

If the child is only going to produce one postverbal argument, then choosing the one

that is most accessible should facilitate production in the same way as mentioning

that information first and then the new information. In sum, the nature of the

mechanism driving this effect is still open for debate, though there is strong evidence

against item-based statistical learning, and some evidence in favor of a speaker-based

account over an addressee-based one.

2.3. STUDY 1B: ADULT LOCATIVES 71

2.3 Study 1B: Adult locatives

2.3.1 Methods

The participants for this study were 14 adults (8 male/6 female), who were students

at or affiliates of Stanford University. The methods for the study were identical to

those in Study 1A, except that the auditory stimuli were not presented with a child-

directed speech style. Participants were tested individually in a quiet room on or near

the Stanford campus and received monetary compensation for their participation.

2.3.2 Results

Of a possible 252 adult responses (18 per participant), 238 (94%) met the inclusion

criteria of being initial responses with the target verb and at least one postverbal

argument. In a few cases (n=13), adults used a different verb in their initial responses.

As with in Study 1A, these responses were excluded from the analysis. One additional

response (viz. She’s pouring a glass of orange juice. S41, control condition) was

excluded because it involved a measure phrase as the locatum argument, which

contained some of the same lexical material (glass) as the location.

Word order. Unlike the child data, the adult data showed very different patterns

for responses with one postverbal argument compared to those with two. There were

only 13 adult responses with one postverbal argument (see 45).

(45) a. Squirting the towel. (S48, control condition)

b. Filling the jar. (S47, locatum-given condition)

c. The boy covered the flower. (S41, location-given condition)

These were all location-object constructions (mostly with location-object verbs).

They were fairly evenly distributed across the discourse conditions: five in the control


condition (with cover, fill, and squirt), five in the locatum-given condition (with

cover and fill), and three in the location-given condition (with cover and squirt).

Figure 2.6 shows the distribution of locatum- and location-object responses

across verbs and conditions for the data with two postverbal arguments. As ex-

pected, adult choices with the non-alternating verbs showed essentially no alter-

nation. Locatum-object verbs were always realized with locatum-objects. And

except for one use of fill with a locatum-object (viz. Filling it into the cup.

S38, locatum-given condition), location-object verbs were always realized with

location-objects.

condition

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

control

locatum

location

drop (locatum-obj)

control

locatum

location

pour (locatum-obj)

control

locatum

location



0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8


Figure 2.6: Study 1B: Proportion of locatum-object constructions in responses withtwo postverbal arguments.


Counter to expectations, however, there was very little evidence of alternation

with the two alternating verbs. There was only one use of stuff in a two-argument

location-object construction and two uses of squirt:

(46) a. So she just stuffed the purse with the shirt.

(S49, location-given condition)

b. He’s squirting the towel with water. (S42, control condition)

c. Squirting the towel with the water. (S50, locatum-given condition)

Otherwise, the alternating verbs pattern identically to the locatum-object verbs.

Clearly, discourse condition did not have a strong influence on adult’s syntactic

choices. Their choices were essentially fully determined by the verb.

Word order and referring expressions. Given that adults were tested with

the same procedure as children, one might wonder whether they found the task too

unnatural and, therefore, did not adapt their responses to the discourse. In other

words, perhaps they treated the task as if it did not involve participating in a coherent

conversation. If so, adult referring expressions, like word order, should show no

evidence of discourse sensitivity. But this was not the case. As in the child data,

givenness (given, new) and choice of referring expression (indefinite NP, definite NP,

pronoun) were highly correlated for locatums (Spearman’s r=0.55, p<0.0001) and

for locations (Spearman’s r=0.66, p<0.0001).

Like children, adults often used pronouns to mark discourse status. In fact, adults

used pronouns exclusively for given information (see Figure 2.7). Adults were also

more likely to use indefinite NPs for new information than for given information.

Overall, 93% of discourse-given referents were marked as given (either with definite

NPs or pronouns), compared to 68% of discourse-new referents (definite NPs only).

Of course, these definite NPs for discourse-new information were appropriate given

the context of joint attention.


The only arguably infelicitous referring expressions in the adult data were the

occasional indefinite NPs for given information (n=11). All of these were bare nouns

referring to mass noun locatums (see 47).

(47) a. E: What’s she doing with the milk? (locatum-given condition)

S38: Pouring milk into the bowl.

b. E: What’s she doing with the dirt? (locatum-given condition)

S43: She’s filling a jar with dirt.

Given the fact that only part of the mass of these locatums was transferred to the

location, these indefinite NPs for given information were not particularly unnatural

(see §2.1 and §2.2.2).

Thus, while adults did not use word order to mark discourse status, their use of

referring expressions reflected sensitivity to the discourse. In fact, the distributions of

referring expressions in the child and adult data were strikingly similar (cf. Figures

2.3 and 2.7). For both groups, given arguments (whether locatums or locations)

were mostly pronominal, new locatums were about as likely to be definite NPs as

indefinite ones, and new locations were mostly realized as definite NPs.

2.3.3 Discussion

The pressing question raised by the adult data is this: Why did the two verbs that

purportedly alternate in adult speech (stuff and squirt) show so little evidence of

alternation? The reason cannot be due to the partitive/holistic properties of the

event. In the vignettes for stuff, the location was holistically affected. In those

for squirt, it was only partially affected. If construction choices for stuff and squirt

were fully determined by these semantic properties, stuff should have patterned like

location-object verbs and squirt like locatum-object verbs (cf. Jeffries & Willis

1984). Instead, both patterned like locatum-object verbs.


given locatums new locatums

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0


given locations new locations

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0


Figure 2.7: Study 1B: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs. newlocatums (above) and locations (below).


This lack of alternation might be related to the extra-linguistic prominence of the

locatum (see §2.2.3). Perhaps the contextual salience of the moving locatums

clashed with the discourse prominence of the location in the location-given con-

dition, yielding construction choices no different from the baseline. For the adults,

though, the baseline construction choice was essentially at ceiling with a nearly cat-

egorical preference for locatum-object constructions, so there was no room for the

locatum-given condition to have an effect. In other words, the two discourse con-

ditions both failed, but for different reasons—one because of a cue clash and one

because of a ceiling effect.

But even if this is so, why did the adults have such a strong baseline preference

for locatum-object constructions? There are too few examples of stuff and squirt

in the CDS data presented above to provide insight into how adults use these verbs

in spontaneous speech (see Table 2.4). To check whether adult-adult speech reflects

the patterns found in Study 1B, I analyzed uses of stuff and squirt in the Associated

Press Worldstream segment of the English Gigaword Third Edition corpus (Graff et al.

2007). The corpus was parsed using the Stanford Parser (Klein & Manning 2003a,

2003b), and the parses were not hand-corrected. Verb uses were then extracted using

tgrep2 (Rohde 2001).9 Table 2.5 gives the frequencies of these two verbs with both

the locatum and location as postverbal arguments.10

Like the experimental data, these corpus data show a strong preference for locatum-

object constructions in sentences with both postverbal arguments. But this preference

is much more extreme in the experimental data (99% locatum-object constructions)

than in the corpus data (77% locatum-object constructions). Closer examination of

9I am very grateful to Uriel Cohen Priva for providing these data.10I excluded 16 examples (about golf) with the form stuff NP into X feet, because they prohibit

alternation (cf. Stuff a wedge into 4 feet. vs. *Stuff 4 feet with a wedge.). I thank Shawn Hughes for

this observation.


Verb Locatum-object Location-object Total

stuff 485 (76%) 150 (24%) 635squirt 56 (85%) 11 (16%) 67

Total 541 (77%) 161 (23%) 702

Table 2.5: APW: Distribution of verbs in the English Gigaword Third Edition corpus.

the corpus data suggests that the types of participants in the experimental materials

may be largely responsible for the adults’ syntactic choices. In the corpus results for

squirt, all the location-object responses, with one possible exception (viz. squirt-

ing them with ketchup and mustard) involved animate/body part locations. A few

examples are given below:

(48) a. squirt each other with yogurt

b. squirted the man’s face with mace-like spray

c. squirted a detainee with water in February

By contrast, all the locatums in the experimental stimuli were inanimate. Perhaps

adult speakers basically only use squirt in location-object constructions when the

location is human or perhaps otherwise particularly salient.

In the corpus data for stuff, location-object constructions also had a fairly lim-

ited set of locations. About 40% of them can be easily classified as animates/body

parts. An additional 23% of these constructions involved pronominal locations.

And animacy and pronominality aside, 37% of these sentences fit into one of four

categories:

(49) a. Stuff oneself with something (n=13):

stuffing themselves with unripe mangoes

b. Stuff someone’s mouth/face with something (n=12):

stuffing your face with the candy


c. Stuff someone’s pockets with something (n=14):

stuffing his pockets with wads of cash

d. Stuff a ballot box with something (n=16):

stuffing ballot boxes with votes for Kabila

Of course, some of this uniformity (especially the numerous examples with ballot

boxes) is likely due to the news genre of the corpus. But adults may generally prefer

locatum-object constructions with stuff, except with a limited set of event types or

fixed expressions.

Although the corpus results cannot fully explain why adults avoided location-

object constructions with stuff and squirt, they offer suggestive evidence that this

preference is more general, and not a by-product of the experimental setting. The

baseline construction choices of the adults may have been driven predominately by

global preferences for ordering the types of locatums and locations used in my

study (see Table 2.1).

One potential problem for this interpretation, though, is that Gropen found al-

ternations in adult uses of stuff with seemingly comparable stimuli (Gropen 1989).

Gropen showed adults two-panel picture sequences of a woman stuffing clothes into a

hamper or a boy stuffing toys into a box (see Gropen 1989:31). When locatives were

elicited with questions like those in (50), adults produced locatum-object responses

91% of the time and location-object sentences otherwise. But when they were

elicited with questions like those in (51), they produced locatum-object responses

only 56% of the time.11

(50) a. Locatum-given: What is the woman doing to the clothes?

b. Locatum-given: What is the boy doing to the toys?11Gropen’s picture sequences varied the degree of affectedness of the location (e.g. “half filled”

vs. “filled” vs. “bulging”), but the analyses ignored this distinction.


(51) a. Location-given: What is the woman doing to the hamper?

b. Location-given: What is the boy doing to the box?

Nevertheless, Gropen’s study differed from mine in a number of ways, and any one

of these might be responsible for the divergent results.

First, in my study, the PP in the question prompt was a with-phrase, not a to-

phrase (e.g., What was she doing with the ketchup? ). Highlighting the affectedness

of the given element by using a to-phrase could have driven the effect in Gropen’s

study. Second, in my study, a single item was stuffed into a comparably sized con-

tainer. The container’s larger size in Gropen’s study might have made it more salient

than (or at least as salient as) the locatums, encouraging more location-object

constructions. Third, the stimuli in my study were films, not picture sequences. So

participants saw the locatums in motion, which might have boosted their overall

salience, yielding a greater preference for locatum-object constructions (see §2.2.3).

And finally, Gropen’s participants were asked to produce the referent for the given

information before describing the event (e.g., Point to the box! . . . Say box! . . . Say

stuffing! . . .What is the boy doing to the box?). Perhaps saying the word immedi-

ately prior to producing the description made given-first responses more likely (e.g.,

by boosting their activation in memory).

At this stage, there are several plausible explanations for why the adult data in

my study showed no evidence for discourse-sensitive word order preferences, in spite

of discourse-sensitive choices of referring expressions. In all likelihood, the reason

has to do with the particular properties of the events or event participants, rather

than an unwillingness to use word order to mark discourse status generally. Whether

discourse can influence adults to produce one locative construction over the other

remains an open question.


2.4 Summary

Study 1 confirms that preschool children and adults take account of the discourse in

formulating their utterances. In the child data, discourse sensitivity was manifested

both in the choice of referring expressions and syntactic constructions. In the adult

data, only referring expressions showed sensitivity to the discourse, but I have argued

that the null result for word order may be due to various properties of the target

events and not to a general predisposition against discourse sensitive ordering.

Except for the effects of givenness on word order, adult and child response pat-

terns were very similar. Both groups used more pronouns and definite NPs for given

information than for new information. For both groups, sentences with one postver-

bal argument were more likely to be location-object constructions, and those with

two were more likely to be locatum-object constructions (except for responses with

cover and fill). Also, for the three high-frequency verbs, children’s syntactic choices

looked just like adults’: Drop and pour were produced in locatum-object construc-

tions and cover in location-object constructions. For the three lower frequency

verbs, children, but not adults, were influenced by locatum-givenness: They were

more likely to realize given locatums as the direct object than new locatums.

These data clearly show that early errors with verbs like fill can be attributed to

discourse pressure (cf. Bowerman 1982).

Taken together, the results of this study show that preschool children are well on

their way to the target system with respect to locative alternation. And the points

of divergence in the child and adult responses highlight the importance of taking the

discourse context (as well as the extralinguistic context) into account when analyzing

child production data.

Chapter 3

Study 2: Dative alternation

3.1 Introduction

Study 1A revealed that children use discourse-sensitive ordering for postverbal ar-

guments. The extent to which these results generalize across different verbs, how-

ever, is unclear because Study 1 only considered locative verbs. Also, the verbs in

Study 1 were not well balanced for frequency, nor were the frequency differences

evenly distributed among semantic verb classes. There were two low-frequency al-

ternating verbs, one low-frequency non-alternating verb, and three high-frequency

non-alternating verbs. Study 2 addresses the following questions: (i) Do effects of

discourse on word order generalize to other verbs, and in particular, to alternating

dative verbs as in (52)? and (ii) How does givenness influence alternating verbs that

are high frequency in child-directed speech (CDS)?

(52) Dative alternation

a. She gave the hat to the man. (theme-first: prepositional dative variant)

b. She gave the man the hat. (recipient-first: double-object dative variant)

81

82 CHAPTER 3. STUDY 2: DATIVE ALTERNATION

If discourse influences early word order only when children are unsure about the verb’s

argument structure, then discourse is unlikely to affect construction choices with high

frequency verbs. On the other hand, discourse might influence word order both when

children are less familiar with the verb (Study 1A) and when they know that the verb

permits two variants.

I predict that syntactic choices with highly frequent dative verbs will show given-

before-ordering. Like the locative verbs in Study 1A, though, some dative verbs may

show more susceptibility to discourse pressure than others. If so, I expect patterns

of argument realization in the input or semantic properties of the verb to underlie

this difference in sensitivity. Unlike in Study 1A, patterns of alternation should not

be attributable to child uncertainty regarding syntactic structure, because children

should have ample prior experience with these verbs. I also expect discourse to

influence both choice of referring expression and choice of syntactic construction.

Study 2 differs from Study 1 in that it involves an extra discourse condition, one

in which a non-event participant (viz. the location of the transfer event) was given

information. This condition was added to test whether the mention of additional

referents in the immediate discourse would influence argument structure choices, even

if children did not mention that element in their response (cf. Arnold & Griffin

2007). In the control condition in Study 1, only the agent was mentioned, but in

the two experimental conditions, one of the two postverbal arguments was mentioned

along with the agent. For Study 2, the location-given condition provides an

additional control condition, in which both theme and recipient are discourse-new,

but two elements (the location and the agent) are mentioned in the discourse.

This condition also serves to balance the number of animate entities (agents and

recipients) and inanimate entities (themes and locations) highlighted in the

discourse. Given that this condition does not directly affect the discourse status of

3.2. STUDY 2A: CHILD DATIVES 83

the postverbal arguments, I expect that responses in this condition will pattern like

those in the control condition (agent-given only).

For Study 1A, I tested two groups of children, three-year-olds and five-year-olds,

and both groups showed the same discourse patterns. For this study, I focused on four-

year-old children, in order to test a group of children with less linguistic experience

than five-year-olds, but who would be more likely than three-year-olds to produce

constructions with multiple postverbal arguments. I also varied the methods for the

child and adult versions of this study in hopes that the adult control study would

provide a more natural discourse situation for the participants. Ultimately, I argue

that children (and adults) indeed prefer given-before-new ordering with the postverbal

arguments of high-frequency dative verbs, although other factors again moderate the

role of discourse in construction choice.

3.2 Study 2A: Child datives

3.2.1 Methods

Participants. I collected data from 66 four-year-olds (3,10-5;4, M=4;8; 31 male/33

female).1 The data from two of the children were excluded, because they failed to

produce any responses with both post-verbal arguments.

Materials. This study tested four alternating dative verbs: give, read, show, and

throw. Compared to the verbs in Study 1, these verbs are very frequent in CDS. The

estimated token frequency of these verbs in the same seven CHILDES corpora used

1Five children were under 4;0, and 11 children were over 5;0.


in Study 1A (see §2.2.3) is as follows: give (n=988), read (n=348), show (n=321),

and throw (n=321).2

The stimuli for this study were five filmed vignettes: one warm-up vignette and

one vignette per dative verb. Each critical-item vignette involved one male actor,

one female actor, and one inanimate object. As in Study 1, the vignettes were silent,

no actor or item appeared in more than one vignette, and the referents for the two

postverbal arguments were matched for number of syllables; male actors were referred

to as boys and female actors as girls (see 53). Also, a photograph was made of each

actor and item individually.

(53) Description of vignettes in Study 2

a. Warm up: a male actor runs around a tree

b. Give: a female actor gives a hat to a male actor

c. Read: a female actor reads a book to a male actor

d. Show: a male actor shows a shirt to a female actor

e. Throw: a male actor throws a ball to a female actor

I used eight nursery rhymes as fillers. These were selected based on how familiar the

children were with them during pilot testing and the types of syntactic constructions

they contain. Most of the verbs in the rhymes were intransitive; none were dative.3

Design. This study used a 4 x 4 design with discourse condition (control, theme-

given, recipient-given, location-given), and verb (give, show, read, throw) as

independent factors.2I extracted these estimates with the CLAN command “freq,” which counted the number of these

forms marked as verbs (in the morphology tier).3The rhymes were these: The Itsy Bitsy Spider; Jack and Jill; It’s Raining, It’s Pouring; Mary

Had a Little Lamb; Humpty Dumpty; I’m a Little Tea Pot; Hey Diddle, Diddle; Twinkle, Twinkle

Little Star.


Procedure. Discourse context was manipulated via the four discourse conditions

mentioned above. Each participant saw all five vignettes. The order of the four critical

item vignettes and the pairing of the vignette with one of the four discourse conditions

were counterbalanced in a Latin squares design. The four orders of vignettes and

four pairings of vignette and discourse condition were then fully crossed, yielding

16 experimental lists. Each list included all four dative verbs, one per discourse

condition. These lists were circulated through the participant pool, so that each list

was completed by four participants.

There were two phases of the experiment, an initial labeling phase and a test

phase. For the labeling phase, I (the experimenter) introduced the task:

(54) This game has fun movies and pictures! First, I want to show you my pictures.

See if you know what these things are!

I then asked children to label a series of pictures: a picture of the tree from the

warm-up vignette, the four given elements from the dative vignettes (agent, theme,

recipient, location), the other three themes, the other three recipients, and

six filler pictures depicting scenes from nursery rhymes.4 This labeling phase took

2-3 minutes.

After the labeling phase, I announced that we were ready for the movies. Before

showing each vignette, I introduced the verb and asked the child to label the picture

of the given information, which was pasted inside a colorful piece of folded paper.

The child labeled the picture, and I ratified the label and began the prompt for the

vignette as shown in (55).4The pictures of the non-given themes and recipients were presented first, followed by the tree

and the four given elements, and finally the filler pictures. Within these three subgroups, the order of

the pictures was drawn randomly for each participant. This ordering minimized the chances that the

non-given themes and recipients would be considered given information during the subsequent

test phase.


(55) Example prompts for Study 2A

Vignette: a female (agent) gives a hat (theme) to a male (recipient)—the

scene takes place near a bush (location)

E(xperimenter): This one’s with giving! Say giving! [[Child: giving]]Great!

And . . .


E: this one goes with the red picture! [[E and child view picture of agent]]

What’s that? [[Child: a girl!]] Yeah! Now let’s watch the movie about

her! [[E shows vignette]] Can you find the girl in that movie? [[Child

points]] Yeah, there she is! Now I’ll start the story about her! Once upon

a time there was a very nice girl. One day, the girl was outside, and

[[E shows vignette again]] what did she do?

b. Location-given condition:

E: this one goes with the green picture! [[E and child view picture of

location]] What’s that? [[Child: a bush! ]] Yeah! Now let’s watch the

movie about it! [[E shows vignette]] Can you find the bush in that

movie? [[Child points]] Yeah, there it is! Now I’ll start the story about

it! Once upon a time there was a green leafy bush. One day, a girl was

outside by the bush, and [[E shows vignette again]] what did she do?

c. Theme-given condition:

E: this one goes with the blue picture! [[E and child view picture of

theme]] What’s that? [[Child: a hat! ]] Yeah! Now let’s watch the movie

about it! [[E shows vignette]] Can you find the hat in that movie?

[[Child points]] Yeah, there it is! Now I’ll start the story about it! Once

upon a time there was a nice brown hat. One day, a girl was outside with

the hat, and [[E shows vignette again]] what did she do?


d. Recipient-given condition:

E: this one goes with the yellow picture! [[E and child view picture of

recipient]] What’s that? [[Child: a boy! ]] Yeah! Now let’s watch the

movie about him! [[E shows vignette]] Can you find the boy in that

movie? [[Child points]] Yeah, there he is! Now I’ll start the story about

him! Once upon a time there was a very nice boy. One day, a girl was

outside with the boy, and [[E shows vignette again]] what did she do?

Children in this study labeled the discourse-given information once and heard it

mentioned five times. The question children answered (i.e., What did he/she do?)

was the same across discourse conditions. Finally, between each vignette, children

randomly chose two nursery rhyme filler pictures (different from the filler pictures

shown during the labeling phase). Then we recited or sang the corresponding rhymes.

Coding and analysis. Audio and video recordings were made of all experimental

sessions and transcribed for analysis. The statistical analyses for this study were the

same as those used for Study 1 (see §2.2.1). And as in Study 1, I only included initial

responses to the elicitation prompt that contained the target verb and at least one

postverbal argument. The primary coding was based on the referent of the direct

object and the presence or absence of a recipient-PP. Overall, children gave four

types of responses: (i) ‘verb + theme’ (56a), (ii) ‘verb + recipient-PP’ (56b), (iii)

‘verb + theme + recipient-PP’ (56c), and (iv) ‘verb + recipient + theme’ (57).

Responses of the first three types were coded as prepositional datives, and those of

the last type were coded as double-object datives.


(56) Responses coded as prepositional datives

a. Read a book. (control condition; S11, 4;1)

b. Read to a little boy. (location-given condition; S43, 4;9)

c. She readed a book to the boy. (recipient-given condition; S13, 4;5)

(57) Responses coded as double-object datives

a. Give the boy a hat. (control condition; S03, 5;2)

b. Read him a book. (recipient-given condition; S50, 4;1)

c. He showed the lady a t-shirt. (recipient-given condition; S44, 5;0)

Only themes and recipients were counted as postverbal arguments. In one case,

the child apparently assigned the recipient role to the location when the loca-

tion was given:

(58) E: One day, a girl was outside by the bush and what did she do?

Child (S20, 3;10): Give it the hat.

This was the only response of this type, and I excluded it from the analysis.

As in Study 1, I also coded the form of the two postverbal arguments. I coded

NPs with definite determiners (e.g., the hat, her hat, that hat) as definite, and those

with an indefinite determiner (e.g., a hat) or no determiner (e.g., books) as indefinite.

Recipients of the form somebody or someone were also coded as indefinite NPs.

3.2.2 Results

Of 256 possible responses (4 per child), 172 (67%) met the inclusion criteria (viz. initial

responses that used the target verb and involved at least one postverbal argument).

All of these responses were included in the analysis except for the response in (58)

and one other response that failed to pattern like the others (see 59). This was the

only case in which the theme was realized in a prepositional phrase.


(59) E: One day, a lady sat down with the book and what did she do?

Child (S55, 5;4): Read the boy to the book.

Of the responses that failed to satisfy the inclusion criteria (n=82), 54 (64%) in-

volved a non-target verb, and 20 (24%) involved the target verb but no postverbal

arguments.5 In the 10 remaining cases, the child either declined to respond at all

(n=5), said, I don’t know (n=3), or only produced an NP (n=2 ; e.g., a shirt).

Importantly, a few factors led to categorical syntactic behavior. While these

results are important, they cannot be analyzed in a probabilistic model. Consequently,

I review these results here and exclude them from the statistical analyses below.

First, there were 55 responses that only contained one postverbal argument. These

responses were always prepositional datives, most involving the theme as in (60),

and a few involving the recipient as in (61).

(60) theme-only responses: ‘verb + theme’

a. Showing a shirt. (S12, 4;9, control condition)

b. She read the book. (S63, 4;11, location-given)

c. He throwed the ball. (S42, 4;6, recipient-given)

(61) recipient-only responses: ‘verb + to + recipient’

a. Read to a kid. (S02, 4;7, control condition)

b. She readed to him. (S04; 3;11, recipient-given condition)

One-argument responses were given for all of the verbs. For give, show and throw,

all one-argument responses were of the form in (60). For read, half the responses5Non-target verbs used in the initial responses were the following: (a) for give: hand, pass, put;

(b) for read: get; (c) for show: ask, bring, buy, get, give, hang, hide, look at, pull, put, shake, take,

talk, touch, wiggle; (d) for throw: catch, give, pass, play, stand, and toss. The action in the vignette

for show was clearly the most difficult one for children to interpret.


Discourse condition

Verb Construction Control Location Theme Recip. Total

give V + theme 0 2 1 0 3

read V + theme 4 6 6 2 18V + to + recip. 3 1 0 5 9

show V + theme 2 1 0 2 5

throw V + theme 6 4 4 6 20

Total 15 14 11 15 55

Table 3.1: Study 2A: Distribution of responses with one postverbal argument.

involved a theme-object (see 60), and half a recipient-PP (see 61). Children never

produced constructions with a recipient-object and an elided theme (e.g., *She

read her.), which is generally illicit in adult English (but cf. He taught her.).6 The

distribution of child responses with one postverbal argument is given in Table 3.1.

Second, there were 28 two-argument uses of the verb throw, all of which were

realized in prepositional datives (e.g., He threw a ball to her.). While throw allows

alternation in adult English (cf. He threw her a ball.), children in this study never

used this verb with double-object datives (recipient-first). Finally, there were 36

two-argument responses in the theme-given condition, and all of these were realized

as prepositional datives (theme-first). I discuss these categorical effects further in

Section 3.2.3.

Figure 3.1 gives the proportion of prepositional datives by verb and discourse

condition for the responses with two postverbal arguments. For simplicity, I exclude

the data from the location-given condition from this figure. As discussed below,6Not all dative verbs are equally felicitous with just one postverbal argument. Children generally

avoided the same infelicitous one-argument responses that the adult control group avoided (see Table

3.3). Neither children nor adults used constructions like #show to her or #throw to her.


the location-given condition did not differ significantly from the control condition

or the theme-given condition. The theme-given and recipient-given conditions

consistently yielded the expected patterns, except with throw, which only occurred in

prepositional datives. Across the three verbs that showed alternation, children used

prepositional datives (theme-first) most often when the theme was given (100%),

second most when the location was given (94%), third most in the control condition

(73%), and least when the recipient was given (42%).

condition

proportion

0.20.40.60.81.0

control

theme

recipient

give

control

theme

recipient

read

show

0.20.40.60.81.0

throw

Figure 3.1: Study 2A: Proportion of prepositional datives.


Word order. To test the effects of givenness on construction choice, I fitted a re-

gression model predicting the occurrence of prepositional datives (theme-first). Con-

struction type (prepositional datives vs. double-object datives) was the binary out-

come variable, and discourse condition (control vs. location-given vs. recipient-

given) was the primary predictor variable. I also included age and order (trial num-

ber: 1-4) as control variables, and participant and verb as random effects. Again,

this model excluded the three (partially overlapping) subsets of data that showed no

variation with respect to construction choice: (i) responses with only one postverbal

argument, (ii) responses with throw, and (iii) responses in the theme-given condi-

tion. Age, order, and the random effect for verb did not contribute significantly to

the model and were, therefore, removed. For age, I tried a model with age as a contin-

uous variable (measured in months) and one with age as a binary variable (younger

vs. older children). Neither measure of age was significant.

As expected, the regression showed no difference between the location-given

condition and the control condition (B=6.694, SE=7.707, p=0.385). At this point,

little can be said about the results in the location-given condition. Statistically,

this condition differed from neither the control condition nor the theme-given condi-

tion. The difference between the control condition and the recipient-given condition

just missed significance (B=-10.654, SE=5.669, eB=2.36e-05, p=0.060). When the

model was built to only include a comparison between the control condition and the

recipient-given condition, the difference was significant (B=-1.6337, SE=0.7067,

eB=0.1952, p=0.021). So theme-givenness had a categorical effect on construc-

tion choice (always yielding prepositional datives—theme-first), and recipient-

givenness had relatively small effect (encouraging more double-object datives).

Another way to think about the effects of givenness in these data is to consider the

distribution of different patterns of information flow across the two construction types.

Are prepositional datives and double-object datives equally likely to have a flow of


information that coheres with the discourse? Figure 3.2 shows the distribution of

the three information structure patterns evidenced in the data: (i) given-before-new,

(ii) new-before-given, and (iii) new-new (i.e., responses in the control condition and

the location-given condition). Though prepositional datives were more prevalent

in general, all of the responses with new-before-given ordering were prepositional

datives, and almost all the new-new responses were. The majority of double-object

datives had given-before-new ordering (67%) while just under 40% of the prepositional

datives did. Double-object datives (recipient-first) may, then, be better indicators

of information status than prepositional datives (theme-first), even if given themes

are more likely to occur in first position than given recipients.

prepositional datives double object datives

num

ber o

f res

pons

es

010

2030

4050

new-newgiven-before-newnew-before-given

Figure 3.2: Study 2A: Distribution of information structure patterns.


Word order and referring expressions. As expected, givenness (given, new)

and choice of referring expression (indefinite NP, definite NP, pronoun) were highly

correlated for themes and recipients (for each: Spearman’s r=0.55, p<0.0001).

Figure 3.3 gives the distribution of referring expression types across given versus new

arguments in all of the analyzable data with two postverbal arguments. When an

argument was given (whether theme or recipient), that argument was realized as

a pronoun over 80% of the time. And with one exception (see 62), all other given

arguments were realized as definite NPs.

(62) E: A lady sat down with the book, and what did she do?

Child (S17, 5;2): Read a book to the boy.

Overall, about half of the new arguments were realized as definite NPs and the other

half as indefinite ones (ca. 45% each). Only 10% of all discourse new arguments were

pronominal.

Can the effects of givenness in these data be reduced to a pronoun-first (short-

first) and/or a definite-first preference? Figure 3.4 provides the distribution of the

different types of themes and recipients for the three verbs that showed alterna-

tion.7 Pronominal themes always occurred in prepositional datives (theme-first),

regardless of whether the theme was given (n=23) or new (n=6). There were only

five responses in which both postverbal arguments were pronominal (all prepositional

datives). The categorical effect of theme-pronominality reflects the fact that pronom-

inal themes are strongly dispreferred in double-object datives in American English

(cf. ??She gave him it. vs. She gave it to him.). The children in my sample may have

never heard pronominal themes in double-object datives.7The numbers in the remainder of this subsection are taken from this data set. Recall that all

responses with throw were prepositional datives (theme-first), regardless of the form of the referring

expressions.


given themes new themes

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0


given recipients new recipients

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0


Figure 3.3: Study 2A: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs. newthemes (above) and recipients (below).


In general, pronominal recipients were only slightly more likely to occur in

double-object datives (recipient-first) than in prepositional ones. But here, we

should disregard responses with co-occurring pronominal themes, since theme-

pronominality had an overriding effect on construction choice. Among the responses

with lexical themes, there were 15 pronominal recipients for given information

and five for new information. Those for given information occurred in double-object

datives 80% of the time. Only one (20%) of the five pronominal recipients for

new information was in a double-object dative. Thus, when the theme was lexical

and the recipient was given, almost all (i.e., all but three) pronominal recipients

occurred in double-object datives.

As for lexical nouns, definite NP themes (n=25) occurred in prepositional datives

(theme-first) 76% of the time, while indefinite ones (n=34) occurred in prepositional

datives 56% of the time. Recall that most lexical themes referred to discourse-new

information. There were only three lexical themes for given information (2 definite,

1 indefinite). Like all given themes, these occurred in prepositional datives. Of the

definite lexical themes for new information (n=23), 74% occurred in prepositional

datives, compared to 54% of indefinite themes for new information (n=33). But if

we restrict the data set to responses in which the recipient was also lexical, then

86% of the definite themes for new information (n=14) occurred in prepositional

datives, compared to 74% of the indefinite ones (n=23). Perhaps theme-definiteness

had a small independent effect on choice of referring expression, but more data are

needed to substantiate this claim.

Definite and indefinite NP recipients were equally likely to occur in double-

object constructions (13% of the time). Like lexical themes, there were very few

lexical recipients for given information (n=6, all definite). For these six responses,

all of the co-occurring themes were also lexical. Two (33%) of these were double-

object datives. If we ignore the responses with co-occurring pronominal themes,


indefinite NP themes definite NP themes pronominal themes

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0 theme-first

recipient-first

indefinite NP recipients definite NP recipients pronominal recipients

proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0 theme-first

recipient-first

Figure 3.4: Study 2A: Proportion of prepositional (theme-first) vs. double-objectdatives (recipient-first) for each type of theme (above) and recipient (below).


there were 15 definite lexical recipients for new information and 18 indefinite ones—

20% of the definite ones occurred in double-object datives, as did 17% of the indefinite

ones. It seems unlikely that recipient-definiteness played any independent role in

construction choice.

Because nearly all given arguments were pronominal (and very few new ones

were), we cannot rule out the possibility that givenness influenced construction choice

indirectly via pronominality (short-first). The effects of givenness are not readily

attributable to NP definiteness, though, especially since there were so few cases in the

theme- and recipient-given conditions in which both postverbal arguments were

lexical. In fact, there were only two such cases in the theme-given condition (both

prepositional datives), and six in the recipient-given condition (67% prepositional

datives). Also, with all else held equal, there was little evidence that definite NPs

for new information were more likely to occur in the first postverbal position than

indefinite ones.

3.2.3 Discussion

This study corroborates the finding of Study 1A that discourse-givenness influences

the word order choices of preschool children. Crucially, the data in this study ex-

hibited a clear given-before-new ordering preference. When the theme was given,

children categorically produced prepositional datives (theme-first). When the re-

cipient was given, children were significantly more likely to produce double-object

datives (recipient-first) than in the control condition. Like Study 1, though, not

all verbs were equally affected by discourse pressure, and givenness of one of the

postverbal arguments was more influential than givenness of the other. Also, refer-

ring expressions may have played an important role in construction choice.


Differences among verbs. Unlike the other three verbs, throw only occurred in

prepositional datives (theme-first). This may seem surprising, because throw is

highly frequent in CDS and permits both constructions (cf. Throw her the ball. vs.

Throw the ball to her.). Verb semantics might explain why children avoided double-

object datives with throw. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the double-object construction

(recipient-first) is associated with the meaning cause to possess, while the preposi-

tional dative is often associated with the meaning cause to go. The throwing event in

this study involved a more long-distance and ballistic type of transfer than the other

events (see Pinker 1989; Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2008). Perhaps for this verb, the

cause to go meaning was so salient that the semantic preference outranked pressure

from the discourse to use a double-object construction (cf. Conwell & Demuth 2007).

In fact, according to Rappaport Hovav & Levin’s (2008) account of the dative

alternation, the verbs that alternated in my data (give, read, show) only have the

caused possession meaning and are predicted to alternate based on givenness (and

heaviness). But throw can have either the caused possession or caused motionmeaning

and is predicted to alternate primarily based on the meaning. If children interpreted

the throwing event as caused motion, the pattern of results is precisely what we would

expect given Rappaport Hovav & Levin’s predictions. The cause to go aspect of the

throwing event may have also been particularly salient for pragmatic reasons. In this

event, one actor threw a ball to another. By age four children have generally had

ample experience throwing and catching balls. The focus of such events is more on

the motion of the ball, and less on who happens to have possession of the ball in the

end. In essence, children may interpret these events as being more about the motion

of the theme and less about possession.

Another possibility is that children avoid double-object constructions with throw

because of patterns in the input. An investigation of CDS in the same childes

corpora used in Study 1 yielded over 300 uses of throw. But only 14 instances of


throw in the corpus data involved two postverbal arguments, all of which occurred in

prepositional datives (theme-first).8 A few examples of these are given below.

(63) a. No, throw it to me. (Mother to Adam)

b. You threw it to Mommy? (Mother to Nina)

c. Can you throw the balloon to me? (Mother to Nina)

d. Do you want me to throw the ball to you? (Father to Abe)

The other uses of throw mostly involved the sequence ‘throw + theme (+ directional

phrase)’ as in (64) (see Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2008:136). Many of them directed

the child not to throw things.

(64) a. Hey, you’re not supposed to throw books. (Mother to Abe)

b. Go ahead and throw it in the sink. (Mother to Abe)

c. We’ll throw snowballs at each other. (Mother to Naomi)

d. They were throwing hay on their back. (Mother to Nina)

This is the same syntactic construction as found with prepositional datives, and my

corpus search provided no evidence that children are exposed to double-object datives

with throw. Perhaps for children of this age, the ‘throw + theme’ pattern of argument

realization is entrenched. Throw was the only verb that failed to alternate in the input

(see Table 3.2).9 The present data do not decide between a semantic and an input-

based entrenchment account for the throw results. Also, semantic factors may well

be responsible for the distributional patterns in the input.8There were also 15 uses of throw with an at-PP (e.g., I’ll throw beer bottles at you; Father to

Trevor, 3;10). To be conservative, I omitted these prepositional uses. Including them would not

change the result that all uses of throw had the theme in the first postverbal position.9For the verbs give and show, the frequencies with two postverbal arguments and the proportion

of prepositional datives were calculated from de Marneffe et al.’s (Submitted) data.


Verb Prepositional datives Double-object datives Totalthrow 14 (100%) 0 (0%) 14read 63 (47%) 71 (53%) 134give 171 (26%) 477 (74%) 648show 46 (26%) 129 (74%) 175

Table 3.2: CHILDES: Distribution of verbs with both postverbal arguments inparental speech to 7 children.

Givenness and the role of referring expressions. Both theme-givenness and

recipient-givenness had a significant effect on construction choice, but the effect

of theme-givenness was categorical, while the effect of recipient-givenness was

gradient. In Chapter 2, I attributed the difference between locatum-and location-

givenness to differences in the non-linguistic prominence of those arguments. I argued

that the locatum, as the entity in motion, was more contextually salient than the

location. Thus, when the location was given, the contextual prominence of

the locatum conflicted with the linguistic prominence of the location. But this

explanation does not adequately account for the differences between theme-givenness

and recipient-givenness. Unlike the locatums, not all the themes in this study

were in motion. The theme changed physical locations in the vignettes for give

and throw, but not in those for show and read. Also, the recipients, by virtue of

their humanness, should have been at least as contextually prominent as any of the

themes, which were all inanimate.

The difference in theme- and recipient-givennes, however, may be due to an

asymmetry in how pronominal themes and recipients are realized. Pronomi-

nal themes are strongly dispreferred in final position in American English, while

pronominal recipients are perfectly acceptable there (see Green 1971; Erteschik-

Shir 1979; Collins 1995; Bresnan & Nikitina 2009; Anttila et al. In press, among

others):


(65) She read the boy a book.

a. ?? She read the boy it.

b. ?? She read him it.

(66) She read a book to the boy.

a. She read a book to him.

b. She read it to him.

In my data with two postverbal arguments (even including those for throw), there

were only six lexical themes for given information and seven lexical recipients for

given information. If children had already acquired the target-like restriction against

pronominal themes in double-object constructions, this would essentially ensure that

all the given themes appeared in prepositional object constructions (theme-first).

The fact that pronominal themes used for discourse new information also categor-

ically appeared in prepositional datives supports the idea that children, like adults,

avoid pronominal themes in double-object constructions, independent of the discourse

context. Because this restriction does not apply to pronominal recipients, recip-

ients referring to given information (even though mostly pronominal) were not as

likely a priori to be ordered first.

To what extent, though, can we attribute the effects of word order to pronominal-

ity? All pronominal themes were realized in prepositional datives, but so were all

given themes, whether pronominal or lexical. For the three verbs that showed alter-

nation, there were only three lexical themes for given information and 11 pronom-

inal themes for new information. Given the sparsity of the data in which theme-

givenness and theme-pronominality were dissociated, we cannot determine whether

theme-givenness has an independent effect on word order apart from influencing the

form of the referring expression.


Recipient-pronominality may have also been a driving force in the effect of the

recipient-given condition. Most given recipients were pronominal, and pronomi-

nal recipients were more likely to appear in double-object datives (recipient-first)

than in prepositional ones (theme-first). But in the data with lexical themes, this

was only true for pronominal recipients that referred to given information. Four

of the five pronominal recipients that referred to new information appeared in

prepositional datives. The data with two lexical postverbal arguments also hint at

an independent influence of recipient-givenness, but again there were too few cases

to say for sure. As with theme-givenness, then, we cannot fully assess whether

recipient-givenness influences word order directly or indirectly by influencing the

type of referring expression.

Summary. Study 2A reveals that four-year-olds prefer given-before-new order with

dative verbs, though some dative verbs (at least throw) apparently resist discourse-

sensitive ordering, perhaps because of semantic or pragmatic properties of the verb,

or because of how these verbs are used in the input, or both. Givenness of both

postverbal arguments influenced dative syntax, though theme-givenness had more

of an effect than recipient-givenness, likely because of asymmetric restrictions on

the placement of theme and recipient pronouns.

Givenness had a massive impact on the choice of referring expression. The ex-

tent to which givenness influences word order independent of pronominality remains

an open question. Interestingly, though, when children did use double-object con-

structions (recipient-first), these responses generally exhibited the most discourse-

coherent flow of information (i.e., given-before-new) (cf. Clifton & Frazier 2004;

Brown et al. Submitted). The same cannot be said for prepositional datives, though

there were more given-before-new than new-before-given orderings among these re-

sponses as well.


Two important caveats are in order, though, with respect to the interpretation of

these data. First, children saw a picture of the discourse-given information prior to

viewing the vignette. In Study 1A, children also saw a picture prior to the vignette,

but the picture was of the entire scene, not just the discourse-given information.

This procedural change was intended to provide a natural context for labeling the

discourse-given information (and not the other items) prior to viewing the vignette,

thus increasing the child’s awareness that that element was, indeed, discourse-given.

But this manipulation also meant that the visual stimuli were not held constant across

the discourse conditions. Although children described the same event (i.e., vignette)

regardless of the discourse condition, they saw a different picture prior to viewing

the vignette, depending on the discourse condition. Consequently, we cannot rule

out the possibility that seeing the picture of the given information immediately prior

to viewing the vignette was responsible for the discourse effects. In other words,

the visual context (physical copresence) and not just discourse context (linguistic

copresence) might have affected the responses (see §1.5).

Second, children in this study were told that the vignette and the corresponding

story were about the discourse-given information (e.g., Now let’s watch a movie about

it! . . .Now I’ll start the story about it! ; see 55). Aboutness or topicality is strongly

associated with discourse-givenness, but the two need not overlap perfectly, as dis-

cussed in Section 1.5. Perhaps the effects of discourse were due more to the fact that

I highlighted the topicality of the given elements than simply that the elements were

mentioned in the discourse. These two design issues are remedied in Study 3.

3.3. STUDY 2B: ADULT DATIVES 105

3.3 Study 2B: Adult datives

3.3.1 Methods

Participants. I collected data from 28 adults (10 male/18 female). One participant

was replaced, because, as she reported afterward, she answered the questions as if I

had asked What happened? rather than the actual questions.

Materials. Adult participants saw the same critical item vignettes as children. There

were, however, four additional critical item vignettes for the adult study. These

involved the same four dative verbs as the other events. None of the actors or items

appeared multiple times in any of the vignettes, and each vignette had one male actor

and one female actor. A description of the additional vignettes is given in (67).

(67) Description of the additional critical-item vignettes in Study 2B

a. Give: a female actor gives a hat to a male actor

b. Read: a male actor reads a book to a female actor

c. Show: a male actor shows a coat to a female actor

d. Throw: a male actor throws a ball to a female actor

Eight filler vignettes were also included in this study. These were the intransitive

fillers from Study 1 and two additional vignettes (both with skipping). Like children,

adults also saw a picture of the given information before viewing the vignette. Adults

were also given an unrelated pencil and paper distractor task between each vignette.10

Procedural changes for adults. I adapted the methods of Study 2A so that

the adult task would seem more natural. At the beginning of the session, adult10For this task, participants saw the two words that make up a compound noun (e.g., DISH

WASHER) and were asked to choose which of three spelling options they preferred (e.g., dishwasher,

dish-washer, dish washer).


participants were told that they would be describing simple films and working on a

paper task between each film. Instead of introducing the verb and having the adult

repeat it, I gave the adults a list of the verbs (dative verbs and fillers) and asked them

to read the list out loud at the beginning of the session. I then told them that each

of their answers should involve one of the verbs on the list.

I also emphasized that the order of the films needed to be random. I asked

participants to randomly choose from a stack of cards, open the card and show me

the picture inside so that I could find the corresponding film. I specified which stack

they should draw from so that (i) the order of films would always be a critical item

followed by a filler, and (ii) the four vignettes tested in the child study would be tested

before the additional vignettes. The four vignettes from Study 2A were tested first

to ensure the validity of comparisons between the child and adult responses for the

first set of vignettes, in case the vignettes tested later in the study showed evidence

of priming or practice effects.

When adults drew a card and showed me the picture, I said (as though to myself),

Okay, the one with the X, where X was always the given information. I then pre-

sented the vignette. This method not only served the stated purpose of randomizing

the films, but it also ensured that adults, like children, saw a picture of the given in-

formation and heard a label for it prior to viewing the vignette. The prompt format

for adults is given below.

(68) Example prompts for Study 2B

Vignette: a female (agent) gives a hat (theme) to a male (recipient)—the

scene takes place near a bush (location)

[[E shows vignette]] . . .


E: Here, the woman was outside, and what did she do?


b. Location-given condition:

E: Here, a woman was outside by the bush, and what did she do?

c. Theme-given condition:

E: Here, a woman was outside with the hat, and what did she do?

d. Recipient-given condition:

E: Here, a woman was outside with the man, and what did she do?

As in Study 1A, the agent was the only given referent in the control condition.

Because the experimenter labeled the picture of the agent prior to the prompt, the

agent was referred to with a definite NP (68a). In the other conditions, the first

mention of the agent was in the prompt itself, and hence indefinite (68b)-(68d).

After responding to each film, adults were asked to spend one minute working on

paper task. The four dative films seen by the children were always shown first, sepa-

rated by filler vignettes and presented in the random order chosen by the participant.

The other four dative films were presented in a second block with the same method.

3.3.2 Results

Of 224 possible responses (8 per participant), 214 met the inclusion criteria (viz. initial

responses that used the target verb and involved at least one postverbal argument).

All other responses were excluded from the analysis.

Some adult responses (n=58) only contained one postverbal argument. These

were very similar to those in the child data (cf. Tables 3.1 and 3.3). All one-argument

responses were prepositional datives (theme-first). With show and throw, the omit-

ted argument was always the recipient (e.g., He showed the jacket.). With read,

the omitted argument was sometimes the recipient (e.g., She read the book.) and

sometimes the theme (e.g., She read to the boy.). Also, adults never used one-

argument responses with give, and children rarely did. The only clear difference


Discourse condition

Verb Construction Control Location Theme Recip. Total

read V + theme 0 2 2 0 4V + to + recip. 10 7 3 7 27

show V + theme 1 1 2 1 5

throw V + theme 6 5 5 6 22

Total 17 15 12 14 58

Table 3.3: Study 2B: Distribution of responses with one postverbal argument.

between the child and adult one-argument responses was that children preferred the

‘read + theme’ pattern over the ‘read + to + recipient’ pattern (67% vs. 33%),

while the opposite preference emerged in the adult data (13% vs. 87%).

Unlike the child data, though, there was variation in construction choice among the

two-argument adult responses in the theme-given condition and with the verb throw.

Consequently, these data were included in the statistical analyses below. Figure 3.5

gives the proportion of prepositional datives by verb and discourse condition in the

adult data (excluding the location-given condition, which did not differ from the

control condition).

Word order. To test the effects of givenness on construction choice, I fitted a regres-

sion model with construction type (prepositional dative vs. double-object dative) as

the binary outcome variable and discourse condition (control vs. location-given vs.

theme-given vs. recipient-given) as the primary predictor variable. I also included

order (trial number: 1-8) and video set (1 vs. 2) as control variables and random ef-

fects for participant and verb. Order, video set, and the random effect for participant

did not contribute significantly to the model and were, therefore, removed.

Table 3.4 gives the results of this model. As expected, the location-given con-

dition did not differ from the control condition. The negative coefficient for the


condition

prop

ortio

n N

P P

P

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

control

theme

recipient

give

control

theme

recipient

read

show

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0throw

Figure 3.5: Study 2B: Proportion of prepositional datives in responses with twopostverbal arguments.


Factors Coefficient SE Odds P-value

theme-given condition 2.6464 0.5714 7.4120 0.000456 ***location-given condition -0.1015 0.5725 0.9035 0.859271 n.s.recipient-given condition -0.6146 0.5944 0.5409 0.301131 n.s.

Table 3.4: Study 2B: Results of model predicting prepositional datives in responseswith two postverbal arguments.

recipient-given condition reveals that prepositional datives (theme-first) were less

likely when the recipient was given than in the control condition, but this difference

was not significant. But there was a significant effect of the theme-given condition.

When the theme was given, participants were over seven times more likely to use a

prepositional dative (theme-first) than in the control condition. The fit of the model

was good (C-statistic=0.83, Dxy=0.67, R2=0.97).

Curiously, the distribution of different patterns of information flow across the two

construction types was quite different from that in the child data (cf. Figures 3.2

and 3.6). New-new (i.e., control condition) responses were more likely to be double-

object datives (recipient-first) than prepositional ones (theme-first), while given-

before-new and new-before-given patterns were basically equally common in the two

construction types.11 In these data, only 31% of double-object datives involved given-

before-new ordering (compared to 67% in the child data); 46% of prepositional datives

had given-before-new ordering (similar to the 39% in the child data). Unlike children,

adults apparently did not reserve double-object datives for discourse-consistent word

orders. This difference is likely due to asymmetries in how adults and children referred

to the recipient, which I discuss below.11The preponderance of new-new responses among double-object datives is mostly due to the data

for give and show. For read and throw, double-object datives were rare, regardless of the pattern of

information flow.



num

ber o

f res

pons

es

010

2030

4050


Figure 3.6: Study 2B: Distribution of information structure patterns.


Word order and referring expressions. As in the child data, givenness (given,

new) and choice of referring expression (indefinite NP, definite NP, pronoun) were

significantly correlated for both themes (Spearman’s r=0.35, p<0.0001) and recip-

ients (Spearman’s r=0.53, p<0.0001). Figure 3.7 shows the distribution of referring

expression types across given versus new arguments.12 Half of the given themes were

realized as pronouns. With one exception (see 69), the rest were realized as definite

NPs.

(69) E: Here, a woman was outside with the hat, and what did she do?

S26: Gave him a hat.

When the recipient was given, all recipients were pronominal. Curiously, among

the recipients for new information, 38% were pronominal and all but two of the

lexical ones were definite. Thus, adult speakers almost categorically avoided indefinite

recipients.

In the regression model presented in Table 3.4, theme-givenness had a significant

effect on construction choice (more theme-first responses). There were also more

recipient-first responses when the recipient was given, but this effect did not

reach significance. Are these findings attributable to choices of referring expressions?

Figure 3.8 gives distributions of different types of themes and recipients across

the two constructions.

There were only two responses with indefinite NP recipients, both in the control

condition—one in a prepositional dative (70a) and one in a double-object dative (70b).

(70) a. Read a book to a little kid. (S12)

b. Give a man a hat. (S21)12For one response (viz. She gave the man [xxx] hat. S27, theme-given condition), the definiteness

of the theme was not determinable because of noise in the recording. This response is excluded for

the graphs and analyses that distinguish between definite and indefinite themes.



proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0



proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0


Figure 3.7: Study 2B: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs. newthemes (above) and recipients (below).



proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0 theme-first

recipient-first


proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0 theme-first

recipient-first

Figure 3.8: Study 2B: Proportion of prepositional (theme-first) vs. double-objectdatives (recipient-first) for each type of theme (above) and recipient (below).


Adults occasionally produced indefinite NP themes (n=32), but only one was for

given information (see 69). Definite and indefinite NP themes referring to new

information were essentially equally likely to occur in prepositional datives (31% vs.

28%, respectively). Definite themes for given information were more likely to occur

in prepositional datives (53%) than those for new information (31%). Thus, these

data provide no convincing evidence that NP definiteness played an independent role

in construction choice. If anything, it seems that theme-givenness played a role over

and above the choice of referring expressions.

But are the effects of givenness attributable (at least in part) to pronominality

(short-first)? As in the child data, pronominal themes always occurred in preposi-

tional datives (theme-first). In the adult data, all pronominal themes referred to

given information, and there were only three responses in which both the theme and

the recipient were pronominal (see 71).

(71) a. He threw it to her. (S08)

b. He was showing it to her. (S08)

c. I guess he showed it to her. (S12)

Although recipient-pronominality did not have a categorical effect on construc-

tion choice, recipient-pronouns were much more likely to occur in double-object

datives (77%) than in prepositional ones (23%). But only 46% of adults’ pronom-

inal recipients referred to given information. If recipient-givenness played a

role over and above the choice of referring expression, then given pronominal re-

cipients should have been more likely than new ones to occur in double-object

datives (recipient-first). This apparently was not the case. In the data with lexical

themes, 74% of pronominal recipients for given information were in double-object

datives (recipient-first), compared to 86% of those for new information.



Location-given & recip. NP -0.4486 0.7656 0.6385 0.55793 n.s.Theme-given & recip. NP 3.1410 1.2349 23.127 0.01098 *Control & recip. pro -4.0564 1.3810 0.0173 0.00331 **Location-given & recip. pro -2.3074 1.0024 0.0995 0.02134 *Theme-given & recip. pro -3.6292 1.3964 0.0265 0.00935 **Recipient-given & recip. pro -2.0050 0.8103 0.1347 0.01335 *

Table 3.5: Study 2B: Results of model predicting prepositional datives in responseswith two postverbal arguments and lexical themes.

Given the distribution of referring expressions in the adult data, we can ask two

questions: (i) Were lexical themes for given information significantly more likely to

appear in prepositional datives than those for new information? and (ii) In the data

with lexical themes, did discourse condition play a significant role in the position

of pronominal recipients? To address these questions, I created a new factor by

crossing the levels of discourse condition (n=4) with the levels of recipient pronom-

inality (n=2), omitting the empty cell for lexical recipients in the recipient-given

condition. This yielded a seven-level factor, and I fitted a regression model compar-

ing the level with the control condition and lexical recipients to each of the other

levels, which are listed in Table 3.5. I ran this regression only on the subset of the

data containing lexical themes. I also included video set and trial order as control

variables and participant and verb as random effects. As before, video set, trial order,

and the random effect were not significant in the model and were, therefore, removed.

The results of final model are presented in Table 3.5, and the model fit was good

(C-statistic=0.90, Dxy=0.81, R2=0.86).

As expected, there was no significant difference between responses in the con-

trol condition with lexical recipients (the comparison level) and responses in the

location-given condition with lexical recipients. There was, however, a significant


difference between responses in the comparison level and those in the theme-given

condition with lexical recipients. When both postverbal arguments were lexical,

prepositional datives (theme-first) were over 20 times more likely when the theme

was given than in the control condition. In other words, theme-givenness signifi-

cantly affected construction choice even when both postverbal arguments were lexi-

cal. So the significant effect of theme-givenness is not fully attributable to theme-

pronominality.

All the levels involving recipient-pronouns were significantly different from the

comparison level. Regardless of the discourse condition, prepositional datives (theme-

first) were significantly less likely when the recipient was pronominal than when

it was lexical and in the control condition (hence the negative coefficients for these

levels). In other words, if the recipient was pronominal, it was significantly more

likely to be realized in double-object datives (recipient-first). There was no signifi-

cant difference between the four level in which the recipient was pronominal. This

means that pronominal recipients referring to discourse-new information were as

likely to appear in double-object datives as those referring to discourse-given informa-

tion. Thus, recipient-pronominality had an independent influence on construction

choice, but there is no evidence that recipient-givenness influenced construction

choice beyond encouraging pronominal recipients.

3.3.3 Discussion

Like the children in Study 2A, the adults in this study showed a reliable preference

for given-before-new ordering. And as in the child data, the effects of givenness were

not the same across the board. Some verbs seemed to be more affected by discourse

pressure than others. The effects of theme- and recipient-givenness were not

equally robust, and theme- and recipient-pronominality showed different patterns

across conditions and construction types.


Discourse condition

Verb Control Location Theme Recipient Total

give 14 14 13 12 53show 12 14 12 13 51read 4 4 8 5 21throw 8 7 8 8 31

Total 38 39 41 38 156

Table 3.6: Study 2B: Distribution of responses with two postverbal arguments.

Differences among verbs. All four verbs in the adult data showed some evidence of

discourse-sensitive alternation. But Figure 3.5 shows more extreme patterns of such

alternation for give and show than for read and throw. The difference among verbs

in the adult data may be due in part to an imbalance in the number of responses

with two postverbal arguments for each of these verbs. Responses with two postver-

bal arguments were more common for give and show than for read and throw. Table

3.6 provides the distribution of responses with two postverbal arguments across dis-

course conditions. Given the sparsity of the data for read and throw in each discourse

condition, the apparent differences in discourse effects may not be meaningful.13

Givenness and the role of referring expressions. Theme-givenness had a sig-

nificant effect on adult construction choice, even in the subset of data where both

postverbal arguments were lexical. Thus, the fact that pronominal themes al-

ways occurred in prepositional datives (theme-first) does not fully account for the

effect of theme-givenness. The influence of recipient-givenness is less straight-

forward. Recipients were generally more likely to occur in double-object datives13But if they are, the difference for throw might well be due to the same semantic/pragmatic

and or usage factors that likely influenced the child construction choices for throw (see §3.2.3). The

reason read should be less sensitive to the discourse than give and throw is unclear to me.


(recipient-first) in the recipient-given condition than in the control condition,

but not significantly so. The regression including recipient-pronominality provided

no evidence that recipient-givenness influenced construction choice over and above

the role it played in increasing (actually, maximizing) the amount of recipient-

pronominalization. Pronominal recipients were significantly more likely to appear

in double-object datives, but given pronominal recipients did not show a greater

tendency to appear in double-object constructions than new ones. And because all

given recipients were pronominal, we cannot assess whether given lexical recipi-

ents (like given lexical themes) would have been more likely to appear in double-

object datives than new ones.

The fact that theme-givenness had a more robust effect on construction choice

may well be related to the differential distribution of referring expressions for themes

and recipients. But the complexity of this distribution makes a fair comparison

of the effects of theme-givenness and recipient-givenness especially difficult. We

cannot compare the realization of given lexical themes and recipients, because

there were no given lexical recipients. There were given pronominal themes

and recipients, but pronominal themes are only felicitous in prepositional da-

tives (theme-first), while pronominal recipients can occur in either prepositional

datives or double-object datives (see §3.2.3). Thus, pronominal themes that refer to

given information are a priori more likely to appear in first position than pronominal

recipients that refer to given information. Finally, we cannot compare pronominal

themes and recipients that refer to new information, because adults only used

pronominal themes for given information (and because of the restriction against

theme pronouns in double-object datives).

Setting aside the comparison with theme-givenness, then, the question remains

as to why discourse-new recipient-pronouns were as likely to appear in double-

object datives as discourse-given ones. The reason may be simply that adults prefer


short-before-long ordering with datives, regardless of whether the short element is

given (cf. Arnold et al. 2000; Wasow 2002; Bresnan et al. 2007; Bresnan & Nikitina

2009; Bresnan & Ford 2010). If so, we might think of construction choice in terms of

the decision tree outlined below:

(72) Hypothetical decision tree for dative construction choice:

Step 1: Will I use a pronominal theme?

• If yes, strongly increase bias toward prepositional datives.

• If no, continue to Step 2. . .

Step 2: Will I use a pronominal recipient?

• If yes, increase bias toward double-object datives.

• If no, continue to Step 3. . .

Step 3: Is the theme (recipient) given?

• If yes, increase bias toward order that yields given-before-new ordering.

• If no, maintain baseline bias.

The current findings can be captured by this simple model, though the model would

likely need to be modified to account for more complex adult utterances produced in a

less controlled communicative setting (e.g., those with especially long or syntactically

complex arguments). But this type of model has the disadvantage that it essentially

ignores the role that givenness plays in determining the choice of referring expression.

Pronominal recipients for new information and those for given information pat-

terned the same, but why did adults use so many pronominal recipients for new

information in the first place? Recall that all recipients in my stimuli were hu-

man (and that the gender of the recipient was always different from the gender of

the agent). Perhaps recipient-animacy or humanness encouraged higher propor-

tions of recipient-pronouns. Themes (and locatums and locations in Study


1B) were all inanimate and were only pronominalized when they referred to given

information.

The absence of a significant difference between realization of given pronominal

recipients and new ones might be explained as follows: When adults treat an argu-

ment as though it were especially prominent (whether or not it was actually prominent

in the discourse), this influences both choice of referring expression and word order.

In other words, if adults decide to pronominalize an argument as though it were

given, they also treat it as though it were given in how they realize it syntactically.

Hence, any potential advantage of pronominal recipients in the recipient-given

condition is neutralized. Whether animacy or humanness or some other factor was

responsible for the initial choice to treat the argument as especially prominent is an

open question. The claim here is simply that this decision could result in choices to

mark the status of this referent both on the referring expression and in the syntax.

So there are two possible conclusions: (i) Recipient-pronominality affects con-

struction choice, but recipient-givenness does not independently influence construc-

tion choice, or (ii) When adults decide (for whatever reason) to treat a recipient

as though it were given, they mark this decision both in their choice of referring

expressions and in their choice of syntactic construction. Further research is neces-

sary to evaluate these explanations, and it may be impossible to fully rule out either

alternative.

Summary. Adults showed a robust preference for given-before-new ordering when

the theme was given, and for short-before-long ordering for both postverbal argu-

ments. Both types of constructions involved more given-before-new ordering than

new-before-given ordering, though double-object datives (recipient-first) had more

responses with new-new ordering than did prepositional datives (theme-first). This

differences is most likely due to the abundance of pronominal recipients when both


arguments were new. With themes, the short-before-long preference aligned per-

fectly with the given-before-new preference, because only given-themes were pronom-

inalized. With recipients, the short-before-long preference was evidenced regard-

less of the discourse condition. While discourse givenness alone does not provide a

straightforward account of recipient-ordering, we cannot rule out the possibility

that whatever drives adults to use pronominal recipients for new information also

drives them to order those arguments first.

3.4 Summary

Givenness influences preschooler’s choice of dative constructions, though it may do so

directly or indirectly. Responses in the theme-given condition were always preposi-

tional datives, and responses in the recipient-given condition were more likely to be

double-object datives. Whether these preferences reflect more of a given-before-new

preference or a short-before-long preference is difficult to determine because of the

nearly perfect alignment of givenness and pronominality. For adults, there is com-

pelling evidence that theme-givenness influences construction choice regardless of

the form of the theme. The case for recipient-givenness is less clear. If anything,

recipient-pronominality seemed to have a stronger influence on construction choice

than givenness per se, but we cannot rule out an alternative cause that simultaneously

influences both the referring expressions and the syntax.

Beyond showing sensitivity to the discourse, there were many other similarities

between the child and adult responses. For both groups, responses with one postver-

bal argument were always prepositional datives (theme-first) and the decision to

mention one or two postverbal arguments seemed to depend more on the verb than

on the discourse. Both groups also categorically avoided realizing theme pronouns

in double-object datives (recipient-first). And both groups were more likely to use

3.4. SUMMARY 123

throw in prepositional datives, though this preference was categorical for children and

gradient for adults.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the child and adult data was the

asymmetry in patterns of pronominalization. Children pronominalized themes and

recipients under the same conditions (i.e., givenness) and at essentially the same

rates (see Figure 3.3). Adults were less likely than children to pronominalize given

themes and more likely to pronominalize new recipients (cf. Figure 3.7). Ap-

parently children chose to pronominalize arguments based almost solely on discourse

status, whereas animacy or some other measure of non-linguistic prominence must

have influenced adult choices.

This difference might be due, at least in part, to task differences. Children heard

the discourse given entity mentioned six times and produced it once prior to describing

the vignette, but the adults never produced it and only heard it mentioned twice (once

when the picture was viewed and once in the question prompt). These procedural

differences were intended to make the adult task more age-appropriate, but they may

have resulted in the discourse context being less striking. If the animate/human

entities in the vignettes were already much more salient, and the discourse did not

sufficiently emphasize the prominence of a different entity in the adult task, this could

explain some of the asymmetry in adult patterns of pronominalization. Regardless,

the primary purpose of of the adult control group was to confirm that adults’ ordering

of postverbal arguments is influenced by givenness in a task similar to the one given

to children. This was indeed the case.

This study confirms that early discourse-driven ordering preferences for postverbal

arguments are not limited to locative verbs, but emerge with dative verbs as well. And

discourse sensitivity was found with verbs that are extremely frequent in CDS. Thus,

children show discourse sensitivity not only when they have not yet fully mastered

a verb’s argument structure (as I argued in Chapter 2), but also when they have


had ample opportunity to learn that both variants are acceptable. Given that adult

choices of dative constructions also reflect discourse-sensitive ordering, it could be

that children use this ordering because they learned it from observing patterns in the

input, whether verb specific or not. The data are also consistent with both addressee-

and speaker-based explanations of this ordering preference. Children may have used

given-before-new (or short-first) ordering because they thought the addressee would

have an easier time understanding it, or because this order was easier for them to

produce (see §1.5). I return to the issue of why children use given-before-new ordering

in the next chapter. The next and final study also shifts the focus away from adult

comparisons and toward the relative importance of the factors responsible for child

construction choices.

Chapter 4

Study 3: Dative alternation revisited

4.1 Introduction

Study 3 was designed as a follow-up to Study 2A, primarily to address these questions:

(i) What role does semantic verb class (viz. caused motion verbs vs. caused possession)

play in influencing child construction choice? (ii) What role does verb frequency play?

and (iii) How do these factors interact with the influence of discourse givenness?

Another goal of this study is to ensure that the effects of givenness in Study 2A were

not due to either the differences in the visual scene across the discourse conditions or

the explicit references to aboutness (see §3.4). In Study 3, I did not show the children

a picture of the given information prior to the vignette, and I never said what the

vignette was about. Assuming that young children are sensitive to the discourse, I

expect to find given-before-new ordering despite the procedural changes.

There may, however, be complex interactions between discourse condition, se-

mantic verb class, and/or verb frequency. Thus far, I have argued that children use

discourse-sensitive ordering when unsure of a verb’s argument structure (Study 1A)

and when they know that the verb allows two alternative orderings (Study 2A). But

in Study 2A, the high-frequency verb throw only occurred in prepositional datives

125

126 CHAPTER 4. STUDY 3: DATIVE ALTERNATION REVISITED

(theme-first)—perhaps because children interpreted the throwing event as a caused

motion event, or perhaps because they had experienced ample evidence for ‘throw +

theme’ in the input, but not for ‘throw + recipient’. If children resist double-object

datives with caused motion events generally, they should avoid double-object datives

for such events even if they lack experience with the verbs themselves. So assuming

that children will interpret the events depicting caused motion verbs as caused mo-

tion events, then caused motion verbs should resist given-before-new ordering more

than the caused possession verbs, regardless of their frequency. But if the categorical

syntactic choices with throw in Study 2A were (instead) a result of prior experience

with this verb, children might use given-before-new ordering more with low-frequency

caused motion verbs than high-frequency ones. In other words, if verb-specific input

patterns moderate the availability of given-before-new ordering, then low-frequency

caused motion verbs should alternate (as in Study 1A), while high-frequency ones

resist alternation (like throw in Study 2A). For the caused possession verbs, though,

we might find given-before-new ordering with both high- and low-frequency verbs,

given that prior linguistic experience, semantic verb class, and discourse all seem to

support this choice.

With this study, I also return to the messy question of why children prefer given-

before-new ordering. As discussed in Chapter 1, this tendency could be driven by

addressee-based production strategies, speaker-based production strategies, or prefer-

ences learned from the input. Like Studies 1A and 2A, this study cannot definitively

answer this question. Here, I simply take up a small piece of the problem and con-

sider whether child production data corroborates the assumptions of speaker-based

accounts. These accounts argue that speakers prefer given-before-new ordering be-

cause this ordering is easier to produce: Given information is more accessible and can

be processed faster (by the speaker) and produced faster, buying time to plan the

4.1. INTRODUCTION 127

production of the new information (see §1.5.2). Does child language data yield any

evidence that using given-before-new ordering actually facilitates production?

Research on adult language has provided ample evidence that disfluencies like long

pauses, fillers, and restarts signal planning and production difficulties (see Goldman-

Eisler 1972; Levelt 1989; Smith & Clark 1993; Clark 1994; Clark & Wasow 1998;

Arnold et al. 2000; Fox Tree 2001; Clark & Fox Tree 2002; Gallo et al. 2008; Tily

et al. 2009, among others). For example, H. Clark and his colleagues have found

that adults use the filler uh to indicate a short but unavoidable delay in production

and um to indicate an imminent long delay (Smith & Clark 1993; Clark 1994; Clark

& Fox Tree 2002). Also, Tily et al. (2009) found that dative constructions in adult

speech corpora were significantly more likely to be disfluent if the speaker chose the

less favored variant in that context. For Tily et al.’s study, probability of a speaker’s

choice was determined by the model of the dative alternation in Bresnan et al. 2007,

which includes the givenness, length, and definiteness of the arguments, among other

factors (see also Arnold et al. 2000).

There is relatively little work on disfluencies in acquisition, but disfluencies indi-

cate planning and production difficulty in child language as well (see H. Levin et al.

1967; MacWhinney & Osser 1977; Rispoli 2003; Bannard & Matthews 2008; McDaniel

et al. 2010, and references therein). H. Levin et al. (1967) showed 24 school children

(aged 5-12) several physical demonstrations and elicited descriptions of varying con-

ceptual difficulty. For example, the experimenter mixed two colorless liquids together

to create a colorful one and asked the children these questions: (i) Tell me what you

see here. (ii) Watch and see what happens. What happened? and (iii) Why do you

think that happened? Children used more pauses, longer pauses, more hesitations,


and a slower speech rate when trying to explain the demonstration than when simply

describing the scene or event.1

In a larger study, McDaniel et al. (2010) tested two groups of children (aged 3;5-

5;9 and 6;1-8;10) and an adult control group in an elicited production task targeting

relative clauses of differing complexity (short and long subject relative clauses, and

short and long object relative clauses). Like adults, children were more disfluent

when producing more complex relative clauses. Also, children were generally more

disfluent than adults, and younger children were more disfluent than older children.

Recent work by Kidd and her colleagues (2009) also indicates that children younger

than three (2;4-2;8) have already learned that disfluencies (specifically, the filler uh)

are associated with production difficulty. When shown an image of a novel object

next to a familiar object, toddlers were faster to shift their gaze to the novel object

when the novel word was preceded by uh (e.g., Look at the uh mog! ) than when it

was produced in a fluent sentence (Look at the mog! ).

Together, these results suggest that preschool children should both produce more

disfluencies when experiencing production difficulty and that they understand that

fillers like uh signal some such difficulty. In light of these findings, I assess whether

disfluencies in four-year-olds’ dative constructions reveal greater production and plan-

ning difficulties with one pattern of argument ordering over another. If given-before-

new ordering is driven (at least in part) by speaker-based processes, I predict fewer

disfluencies in responses with given-before-new ordering than in other responses.1Variation in the data was not attributable to age, though there were too few children in each

age group (n=6) to draw firm conclusions about potential age effects. Also, H. Levin et al. (1967)

did not distinguish between different types of “hesitations,” which included filled pauses like um and

uh (see p. 561).

4.2. METHODS 129

4.2 Methods

Participants. I collected data from 26 four-year-olds (4;0-4;11, M=4;5; 13 male/12

female). Data from one child was excluded, because he only responded to questions

with I don’t know.

Materials. I tested the children on 12 alternating dative verbs. These verbs were

counterbalanced for semantic type (caused possession only vs. caused motion or

caused possession) and frequency (high vs. low) (see Table 4.1). The semantic verb

classes were chosen according to the classification in Levin (1993) (see also Rappa-

port Hovav & Levin 2008; Gropen et al. 1989). For convenience, I refer to the verbs

that only mean caused possession as “caused possession verbs” and those can mean

either caused motion or caused possession as “caused motion verbs.”2 Verb frequency

was determined by how many times the verb was used in child directed speech in the

seven CHILDES corpora used for Studies 1 and 2. Verbs with under 35 uses were

chosen as low-frequency verbs (range: 0-32), and verbs with over 300 uses were chosen

as high-frequency verbs (range: 321-1482).

The stimuli for this study were 13 filmed vignettes: one warm-up vignette and 12

critical-item vignettes, one per verb. Each dative vignette involved one male actor,

one female actor, and one inanimate object. As with Studies 1 and 2, the vignettes

were silent and no actor or item appeared in more than one vignette. The referents

for the themes were all monosyllabic, familiar words, and the position (right/left

side of the screen) and gender (male/female) of the agent and recipient were

counterbalanced both within and across verb classes. The vignette for read and the

warm-up vignette were the same as in Study 2; all other vignettes were new. Table 4.1

provides the list of dative verbs and brief descriptions of the corresponding vignettes.2These labels are further abbreviated as “possession” or “poss.” and “motion” or “mot.” in the

tables.


Semantic type Verb freq. Verb Agent Theme Recipient

possession

highgive male dress femaleread female book maleshow male star female

lowhand female cup maleloan female brush malepass male plate female

motion

highbring male plant femaletake female broom malethrow male box female

lowhurl female boot malekick male ball femaletoss female hat male

Table 4.1: Study 3: List of verbs and events.

Design. This study used a 3 x 2 x 2 x 12 design with discourse condition (con-

trol, theme-given, and recipient-given), semantic verb class (caused possession vs.

caused motion), verb frequency in CDS (high vs. low), and verb (bring, give, hand,

hurl, kick, loan, pass, read, show, take, throw, toss) as independent factors.

Procedure. Discourse context was manipulated via the three discourse conditions

mentioned above. Each participant saw all 13 vignettes. The order of the 12 critical

item vignettes was semi-random. After the warm-up vignette, children randomly

chose a card from one of two piles: one for the caused possession verbs and one for

the caused motion verbs. Half of the children started with a caused possession verb

and half with a caused motion verb. Children subsequently chose a card from each

pile, alternating between caused possession and caused motion verbs until (i) all 12

were presented, (ii) the session ran over time (15-20 minutes), or (iii) the child refused

to continue.

4.2. METHODS 131

The pairing of the vignette with one of the three discourse conditions was coun-

terbalanced across verbs, semantic verb class, and verb frequency. To achieve this,

I constructed three experimental lists. In each list, there were four verbs per dis-

course condition and two verbs from each semantic class in each condition, one high-

frequency and one low-frequency. These three lists were rotated through the partici-

pant pool, such that each child was presented with one list and each list was seen an

approximately equal number of times.

Unlike Study 2A, there was no initial labeling phase in this experiment. Pilot-

ing revealed that children already knew labels for all the themes and recipients.

Eliminating the labeling phase ensured that none of the discourse-new items were

labeled prior to the child’s description of the target event. Also, children did not see

a picture of the given information prior to viewing the vignette (as they did in Study

2), nor were they asked to point to it. These changes were intended to eliminate

the possibility that the discourse effects in Study 2 were due to the visual stimuli

(especially the pre-vignette picture), rather than the discourse context.

I (the experimenter) introduced the study by telling children that I had a game

with movies and cherries (the filler items). After the warm-up vignette and the first

cherry game, the child choose a card from one of the two piles mentioned above.

Sample prompts for this study are given below.

(73) Example prompts for Study 3

Vignette: a female (agent) tosses a hat (theme) to a male (recipient)

E(xperimenter): This one’s with tossing! Say tossing! [[Child: tossing]]

Great! And . . .



E: this movie has a girl in it! Say girl! [[Child: Girl]] Yeah, now

let’s watch! [[E shows vignette]] I see the girl! Do you see her? [[Child

affirms]] Great! Now I’ll start the story! Once upon a time there was a

very nice girl. One day, the girl was outside, and [[E shows vignette

again]] what did she do?

b. Theme-given condition:

E: this movie has a hat in it! Say hat! [[Child: Hat]] Yeah, now let’s

watch! [[E shows vignette]] I see the hat! Do you see it? [[Child affirms]]

Great! Now I’ll start the story! Once upon a time there was a very nice

hat. One day, a girl was outside with the hat, and [[E shows vignette

again]] what did she do?

c. Recipient-given condition:

E: this movie has a boy in it! Say boy! [[Child: Boy]] Yeah, now let’s

watch! [[E shows vignette]] I see the boy! Do you see him? [[Child

affirms]] Great! Now I’ll start the story! Once upon a time there was a

very nice boy. One day, a girl was outside with the boy, and [[E shows

vignette again]] what did she do?

As in Study 2A, the question children answered was the same across discourse

conditions (viz. What did he/she do?). Aside from the differences mentioned above,

the only other change to the procedure in Study 2A was that children were not

explicitly told that the movie or story was “about” the given information (see 55).

Thus, the children in this study were not explicitly told that the given information

had a central role in the event.

Between each critical item, children played the cherry game. I hid three plastic

cherries under one of three identical, opaque dishes, had the children count, shuffled

4.2. METHODS 133

the dishes, and asked the children to find the cherries. After the initial hiding game,

the children chose whether to play the role of the finder or the hider.

Transcription and coding. The audio sessions were transcribed by a research

assistant who was blind to the experimental hypotheses. Because one of the goals

of this study was to analyze disfluency data, the research assistant was instructed

to transcribe the utterances exactly as the child said them, including fillers, restarts,

prolonged determiners, and extra long pauses. For prolonged determiners, she was

told to write two colons (::) after determiners that sounded especially long. For

pauses, she was asked to put a hash mark (#) in the transcript wherever she noticed

a pause within the utterance that sounded longer than usual.3 I then checked each

transcription and disagreements were resolved in consultation.

This method for coding pauses and lengthened determiners was subjective, but it

provided an efficient way to estimate production difficulties that have no correspond-

ing added lexical material (like um, uh, and restarts) (cf. Clark & Fox Tree 2002:81).

To provide a more precise description of the pause data, I subsequently measured (in

milliseconds) all the elements annotated as pauses using the freeware program Tran-

scriber 1.5.1 (Ingham & Reid 2001). For utterance initial filled pauses, I measured

from the onset of the filler to the onset of the following word. For utterance medial

unfilled and filled pauses, I measured the pause from the offset of the preceding word

to the onset of the following word (i.e., the pause duration including the filler).

Once the transcriptions were completed, I coded the utterances for verb produced,

number of postverbal arguments (1 vs. 2), construction type (prepositional dative

vs. double-object dative), type of referring expression for the postverbal arguments

(pronoun, definite NP, indefinite NP), and the categories of disfluencies mentioned3Long pauses prior to the onset of the utterance were not included. Many of these may have

been due to inattention, rather than to difficulty processing. Also, discriminating extra long pauses

before the utterance onset proved especially subjective.


above. As with Study 2, when the child spontaneously reformulated (self-corrected) a

response, the coding was based on the reformulated version, not the original response.

The coding criteria for construction type and referential expression were also the same

as in Study 2 (see §3.2.1). All responses coded were initial responses to the elicitation

prompt. Responses were included in the analysis as long as they involved (a) one of

the targeted dative verbs, even if it was not the verb primed for that particular item,

and (b) at least one postverbal argument.

4.3 Results

Of 300 possible responses (12 per child), 254 (85%) were produced. Children failed to

respond to all 12 elicitation questions either because we ran out time in the session

or (more commonly) because the child refused to finish the session. Of the 254

elicited responses, 225 (89%) met the criteria for inclusion in the analysis. Responses

that contained a non-dative verb or no postverbal arguments were excluded (n=29).4

Although children always repeated the target verb when prompted to do so, they

often replaced the target verb with another dative verb when describing the event.

For example, when prompted with the low-frequency verb loan (as in: This one’s

with loaning! Say loaning! ), most children used the verb give to describe the vignette.

Overall, give was the most common substitute verb. The verbs hand, pass, throw, and

toss were also used as substitutes for the target verb. Responses with substitute dative

verbs were included in the analysis. Table 4.2 shows the distribution of responses for

each verb.4The majority of these were excluded because they contained no postverbal arguments (n=19).

One was excluded because the child failed to respond at all, and 9 were excluded because they

contained a non-target verb (viz. put, share, look).

4.3. RESULTS 135

Verb producedTyp

e

Freq.

Target

Args.

Target give hand pass throw toss Total

caused

possession high

give 1 arg. 2 — 22 args. 14 — 3 17

read 1 arg. 7 72 args. 10 10

show 1 arg. 2 1 32 args. 12 1 1 14

low

hand 1 arg. 1 — 1 22 args. 2 13 — 2 1 18

loan 1 arg. 1 1 22 args. 12 3 15

pass 1 arg. 3 — 32 args. 2 12 — 1 15

Subtotal 51 44 1 10 0 2 108

caused

motion

high

bring 1 arg. 2 2 42 args. 15 1 16

take 1 arg. 1 1 22 args. 14 3 17

throw 1 arg. 6 — 62 args. 16 — 16

low

hurl 1 arg. 6 1 72 args. 13 13

kick 1 arg. 3 32 args. 13 1 14

toss 1 arg. 1 4 — 52 args. 2 12 — 14

Subtotal 43 32 0 5 36 1 117Total 94 76 1 15 36 3 225

Table 4.2: Study 3: Patterns of verb use and substitutions.


As in Study 2, all responses with one postverbal argument (n=46) were preposi-

tional datives. All but four of these responses involved the theme as in (74). The

remaining four (all with the verb read) involved the recipient as in (75).

(74) theme-only responses: ‘verb + theme’

a. He gave a plate. (control condition; S19 , 4;11)

b. Hand it. (recipient-given condition; S12, 4;8)

(75) recipient-only responses: ‘verb + to + recipient’

a. Readed to a boy. (control condition; S04, 4;8)

b. She read to the little boy. (theme-given condition; S19, 4;11)

One-argument responses were given for all the target verbs except take, which was

never produced with postverbal arguments. The distribution of responses with one

postverbal argument is given in Table 4.3 along with the proportion of one-argument

responses per verb. One-argument responses were distributed fairly evenly across

discourse conditions. Apparently, the primary factor contributing to a verb’s realiza-

tion with one versus two postverbal arguments was the verb itself. Read and bring

were among the most likely to occur with one-argument and give and pass among the

least likely (see Table 4.4). Because these one-argument responses show no variation

in construction choice (always prepositional datives), they were excluded from the

analyses that follow.

Of the 12 verbs elicited, only eight were produced in constructions with two

postverbal arguments. Two of them, hand (n=2) and pass (n=15), only appeared in

prepositional datives (theme-first). The distribution of responses with two postver-

bal arguments across conditions and constructions is given in Table 4.5. Because of

the imbalance in the frequency of use of each verb, I present these data in a table

with frequencies, rather than in the type of figures used in the previous studies. The

two verbs that showed no alternation were also excluded from the ensuing analyses.

4.3. RESULTS 137

Discourse condition

Verb Construction Control Theme Recipient

bring V + theme 2

give V + theme 3 5 3

hand V + theme 1

kick V + theme 2 1

pass V + theme 2

read V + theme 2 1V + to + recipient 2 1 1

show V + theme 1 1

throw V + theme 6 5 5

toss V + theme 1 1

Total 14 18 14

Table 4.3: Study 3: Distribution of responses with one postverbal argument.

Verb One-argument Two-arguments Total

bring 2 (100%) 0 (0%) 2give 11 (12%) 81 (88%) 92hand 1 (33%) 2 (67%) 3kick 3 (19%) 13 (81%) 16pass 2 (12%) 15 (88%) 17read 7 (41%) 10 (59%) 17show 2 (14%) 12 (86%) 14throw 16 (28%) 42 (72%) 58toss 2 (33%) 4 (67% ) 6

Total 46 (20%) 179 (80%) 225

Table 4.4: Study 3: Proportion of responses with one vs. two postverbal arguments.


Discourse condition

Type Verb Control Theme Recipient Total

poss.

give 20/26 (77%) 24/24 (100%) 16/31 (52%) 60/81(74%)read 2/2 (100%) 3/4 (75%) 3/4 (75%) 8/10 (80%)show 1/6 (17%) 3/3 (100%) 1/3(33%) 5/12 (42%)hand 0/0 2/2 (100%) 0/0 2/2 (100%)pass 5/5 (100%) 4/4 (100%) 6/6 (100%) 15/15 (100%)

Subtotal 28/39 (72%) 36/37 (97%) 26/44 (59%) 102/120 (85%)

mot.throw 14/14 (100%) 13/14 (93%) 14/14(100%) 41/42 (98%)kick 1/2 (50%) 5/5 (100%) 6/6 (100%) 12/13 (92%)toss 2/2 (100%) 1/1 (100%) 0/1 (0%) 3/4 (75%)

Subtotal 17/18 (94%) 19/20 (95%) 20/21 (95%) 56/59 (95%)

Total 45/57 (79%) 55/57 (96%) 46/65 (71%) 146/179 (82%)

Table 4.5: Study 3: Proportion of prepositional datives in responses with two postver-bal arguments.

Word order. Excluding the categorical data mentioned above (data with one

postverbal argument, and data with the verbs hand and pass), there were 162 re-

sponses across six verbs. To test the effects of givenness on construction choice

in these data, I fitted a logistic regression predicting the presence of prepositional

datives (theme-first). Syntactic construction (prepositional dative vs. double-object

dative) was the binary outcome variable, and discourse condition (control vs. theme-

given vs. recipient-given), verb frequency (high vs. low), and verb type (caused

possession vs. caused motion) were the main predictor variables. I also included age

and order (i.e., trial number: 1-12) as control variables, and participant and verb as

random effects. Verb frequency, age, and order did not contribute significantly to the

model and were, therefore, removed.5

5For age, I tried a model with age as a continuous variable (measured in months), and as a binary

variable (younger vs. older children). Neither was significant.

4.3. RESULTS 139


theme-given condition 3.2741 1.2564 26.42 0.00916 **recipient-given condition -0.6687 0.7380 0.5124 0.36486 n.s.verb type=possession -4.5729 1.8072 0.0103 0.01139 *

Table 4.6: Study 3: Results of model predicting prepositional datives in responseswith two postverbal arguments.

The results of this model are given in Table 4.6, and the model fit was good

(C-statistic=0.98, Dxy=0.96, R2=0.93). Positive coefficients indicate a preference

for prepositional datives (theme-first) and negative coefficients for double-object

datives (recipient-first). As expected, there was a significant effect of theme-given

condition. When the theme was given, children were significantly more likely to use

a prepositional dative (theme-first) than in the control condition. In the recipient-

given condition, prepositional datives were less likely than in the control condition

(hence the negative coefficient for the recipient-given condition), but this difference

was not significant.

There was a significant effect of semantic verb type. Consistent with the analysis

of the dative alternation in Rappaport Hovav & Levin (2008) (see §3.2.3), preposi-

tional datives were significantly less likely with caused possession verbs than with

caused motion verbs. As shown in Figure 4.1, caused motion verbs were almost

exclusively realized in prepositional datives (about 95% of the time, regardless of

discourse condition). The proportion of prepositional datives with caused possession

verbs was more varied, ranging from 53% in the recipient-given condition to 98%

in the theme-given condition.

The different patterns shown in Figure 4.1 suggest an interaction between seman-

tic verb type and discourse condition. Discourse condition influenced construction

choice more for caused possession verbs than for caused motion verbs. Although


this interaction was not statistically significant (and was therefore removed from the

model), the significant difference between the control condition and the theme-given

condition was clearly driven by the data involving caused possession verbs.

condition

prop

ortio

n N

P P

P

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

control

theme

recipient

motion

control

theme

recipient

possession

Figure 4.1: Study 3: Proportion of prepositional datives.

Although this analysis does not show the expected effect of the recipient-given

condition on construction type (viz. significantly more double-object datives with

given recipients), the distribution of information structure patterns across con-

struction type is informative. Figure 4.2 gives the distribution of all the analyzable

responses with two postverbal arguments across construction types for three informa-

tion structure patterns: (i) given-before-new, (ii) new-before-given, and (iii) new-new.

The last category labels responses in the control condition, where neither postverbal

argument was discourse given.

4.3. RESULTS 141


num

ber o

f res

pons

es

010

2030

4050


Figure 4.2: Study 3: Distribution of information structure patterns.


For both prepositional datives (theme-first) and double-object datives (recipient-

first), the most common pattern was given-before-new. For prepositional datives, the

new-new (control condition) and new-before-given (recipient-given condition) re-

sponses were equally frequent. But for the double-object datives, while there were

some new-new responses, there were hardly any new-before-given (theme-given con-

dition) responses. This is consistent with the pattern found in Study 2A (cf. Figure

3.2). Again, the double-object construction seemed to be particularly resistant to

new-before-given ordering.

Word order and referring expression. As in the previous studies, givenness

(given, new) and choice of referring expression (indefinite NP, definite NP, pronoun)

were highly correlated for themes (Spearman’s r=0.55, p<0.0001) and recipients

(Spearman’s r=0.62, p<0.0001). Figure 4.3 gives the distribution of referring expres-

sion types across given versus new arguments in all of the analyzable two argument

data. Except for three indefinite themes for given information, all given arguments

were realized either as pronouns (57%) or definite NPs (41%). New arguments were

mostly realized as definite NPs (57%) or indefinite (38%) NPs. Only 6% of new

arguments were pronominal.

Do choices of referring expressions underlie children’s syntactic choices in these

data? Figure 4.4 gives the distributions of different types of arguments across the

two construction types for the verbs that alternated. These data closely replicate

the patterns found in Study 2A: All pronominal themes, whether given (n=34) or

new (n=3), occurred in prepositional datives (theme-first). Pronominal recipi-

ents were more likely to occur in double-object datives (recipient-first) than in

prepositional datives, but they were used in both. There were no responses in which

both postverbal arguments were pronominal. Most pronominal recipients referred

4.3. RESULTS 143


proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0



proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0


Figure 4.3: Study 3: Distribution of referring expression types across given vs. newthemes (above) and recipients (below).


to given information (n=29), though there were a few that referred to new infor-

mation as well (n=5). Pronominal recipients for given information occurred in

double-object datives 55% of the time, and all but one (80%) of the five pronominal

recipients for new information were in double-object datives.6

As for lexical nouns, definite NP themes (n=65) occurred in prepositional datives

89% of the time, and indefinite ones (n=60) 56% of the time. Of the definite NP

themes, 14 referred to given information and 51 to new information. All of those

referring to given information occurred in prepositional datives, compared to 86% of

those referring to new information. If the data are restricted to responses with lexical

recipients, 91% of definite NP themes referring to new information occurred in

prepositional datives. The only uses of indefinite NPs for given information were the

three responses in (76)-(78), two double object datives and one prepositional dative.

(76) E: . . .One day, a man was holding the box, and what did she do?

Child (S02, 4;3): He throwed the girl a box.

(77) E: . . .One day, a lady sat down with the book, and what did she do?

Child (S25, 4;9): Read someone a book.

(78) E: . . .One day, a girl was outside with the hat, and what did she do?

Child (S23, 4;3): Throw a hat to the man.

Aside from these three instances, all responses in the theme-given condition involved

prepositional datives (theme-first) with definite themes (lexical or pronominal).

Of the indefinite themes for new information, only 58% occurred in prepositional

datives (compared to 86% of definite NP themes for new information). If the data

are restricted to responses with lexical recipients, 76% of indefinite NP themes

6This is true in the data with lexical themes as well, since there were no responses with two

pronominal postverbal arguments.

4.3. RESULTS 145


proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0 theme-first

recipient-first


proportion

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0 theme-first

recipient-first

Figure 4.4: Study 3: Proportion of prepositional (theme-first) vs. double-object da-tives (recipient-first) for each type of theme (above) and recipient (below).


referring to new information occurred in prepositional datives (compared to 91% of

definite NP themes for new information). So the data for lexical themes provide

some preliminary evidence of an independent influence of both givenness (viz. more

given definite NP themes in prepositional datives than new ones) and NP definiteness

(viz. more definite new themes in prepositional datives than indefinite ones), but

more data are needed to determine whether these differences are significant. As for

lexical recipients, even when we exclude data with pronominal themes, definite

NP recipients referring to given information (n=29) and those referring to new

information (n=43) were essentially equally likely to appear in double-object datives

(recipient-first) (10% vs. 14%, respectively).

Nevertheless, because there was more variation in choice of referring expression

for these data than for those in Study 2A, we can provide an initial assessment of

whether recipient-givenness and/or pronominality independently influenced con-

struction choice. As in Study 2B, I created a new factor by crossing the levels

of condition (n=3) by the levels of recipient pronominality (n=2), omitting the

empty cell for pronominal recipients in the theme-given condition. This yielded

a five-level factor, and I fitted a regression model comparing the level with the con-

trol condition and lexical recipients to each of the other levels, which are listed in

Table 4.7. In this analysis, I only included data with lexical themes. I included age

and trial order as control variables, and participant and verb as random effects. Age

and trial order were not significant and were, therefore, removed. This results in the

model presented in Table 4.7. Again, the fit of the model was good (C-statistic=0.99,

Dxy=0.97, R2=0.79).

This model shows that only the case in which the recipient was pronominal and

given was significantly different from the comparison level (responses in the control

condition with lexical recipients). In other words, while pronominality and given-

ness of the recipient influence construction choice in conjunction with each other,

4.3. RESULTS 147


Recipient-given & recip. pro -2.2509 1.06043 0.1053 0.0338 *Control & recip. pro -4.1560 2.6668 0.0157 0.1191 n.s.Recipient-given & recip. NP 0.3012 1.0544 1.3513 0.7751 n.s.Theme-given & recip. NP 0.2747 1.2607 1.3161 0.8275 n.s.

Table 4.7: Study 3: Results of model predicting prepositional datives in responseswith two postverbal arguments and lexical themes.

there is no strong evidence in these data for an independent effect of either recipient-

givenness or recipient-pronominality. This model also fails to show a significant

difference between responses in the control condition with two lexical postverbal ar-

guments (76% prepositional datives) and those in the theme-given condition (88%

prepositional datives), though the trend is in the expected direction. Thus, the data

excluding pronouns altogether (i.e., responses with two lexical postverbal arguments)

fail to offer convincing evidence for an effect of givenness independent of the type of

referring expression. In fact, in all three discourse conditions, most of these responses

were prepositional datives (theme-first). But the expected pattern did emerge (at

least to some extent) for a few of the verbs. These patterns with each of the eight

verbs produced are given in Table 4.8 (cf. Table 4.5).

In sum, then, the current data replicate previous findings that theme-pronominality

perfectly determines construction choice. This is true whether the pronouns refer

to discourse-given themes or discourse-new ones. But pronouns for discourse new

themes are very rare. These data also provide a few clues that theme-givenness and

theme-definiteness may both independently influence construction choice, though

more data are needed to substantiate this claim. Finally, there is very little evidence

here that recipient-givenness or recipient-pronominality alone have a robust influ-

ence on construction choice, though recipients that are both given and pronominal


Discourse condition

Type Verb Control Theme Recipient Total

poss.

give 20/24 (83%) 6/6 (100%) 12/14 (86%) 38/44 (86%)read 2/2 (100%) 1/2 (50%) 1/1 (100%) 4/5 (80%)show 1/5 (20%) 2/2 (100%) 0/1(0%) 3/8 (38%)hand 0/0 0/0 0/0 0/0pass 3/3 (100%) 1/1 (100%) 2/2 (100%) 6/6 (100%)

Subtotal 26/34 (76%) 10/11 (91%) 15/18 (83%) 51/63 (81%)

mot.throw 13/13 (100%) 4/5 (80%) 9/9 (100%) 26/27 (96%)kick 0/0 2/2 (100%) 4/4 (100%) 6/6 (100%)toss 1/1 (100%) 0/0 0/0) 1/1 (100%)

Subtotal 14/14 (100%) 6/7 (86%) 13/13 (100%) 33/34 (97%)

Total 40/48 (83%) 16/18 (89%) 28/31 (90%) 84/97 (87%)

Table 4.8: Study 3: Proportion of prepositional datives in responses with two lexicalpostverbal arguments.

are significantly more likely to appear in double-object datives (recipient-first) than

those that are new and lexical.

Disfluencies. Of the 179 responses with two postverbal arguments, 58 (32%) were

coded as involving at least one disfluency. A few disfluencies are given in bold face in

(79), where a hash mark (#) represents a long pause and double colons (::) an extra

long vowel (also see 80-82).

(79) a. She give #[932ms] him a a a a a #[369ms] a broom.

(S02, 4;3, recipient-given)

b. She threw a boot to a:: man (S03, 4;8, control condition)

4.3. RESULTS 149

Overall, there were 42 responses with unfilled pauses, 15 responses with filled pauses,

25 responses with restarts, and three with prolonged determiners.7

I measured all the filled and unfilled pauses in these data. The frequency and

length of these pauses are given in Table 4.9.8 Pause length varied substantially both

within and across pause types. Recall that initial filled pauses were measured from

the filler onset to the onset of the following word, while utterance medial pauses

were measured from the offset of the previous word to the onset of the following

word. Because of this difference, I report the initial pauses separately in Table 4.9.

Regardless of position, filled pauses with uh were shorter (and less frequent) than

those with um.

Unfortunately, the literature does not provide a gold standard for counting child

pauses as speech disruptions. H. Levin et al. (1967) counted child pauses 80ms and

longer as disfluencies, whereas MacWhinney & Osser (1977) set the cut-off at 250ms,

McDaniel et al. (2010) at 500ms, and Rispoli (2003) at 1-3s (measured with a stop-

watch). All the unfilled pauses in my data were coded as such because the research

assistant who transcribed the data perceived them as “extra long.” None of these

pauses were as short as 80ms, which suggests that this perceptual measure is more

conservative than H. Levin et al.’s (1967) cut-off point. Seven of the unfilled pauses7In the majority of responses with restarts (76%), the restarts began prior to the onset of the

second postverbal argument. Six of the restarts were in double-object datives: three beginning at the

recipient, two at the theme, and one before either postverbal argument. The remaining responses

with restarts (n=19) were prepositional datives. In these, there were 21 restarts altogether: four

beginning at the recipient, 10 at the theme, and seven before either postverbal argument. Overall,

double-object datives and prepositional datives contained approximately the same proportion of

restarts (18% in double-object datives, 13% in prepositional datives).8There was one utterance with two adjacent fillers (viz., She gave the broom to her s- uh um son

S20; 4;0, control condition). Because the utterance medial fillers were measured from the offset of

the previous word to the onset of the following word, I excluded this complex filled pause from the

lengths measures reported in the table.


Pause type N Length range (ms) Average length (ms)

uh (initial) 1 91–91 91uh (medial) 3 230–270 247

um (initial) 2 733–979 856um (medial) 9 651–3287 1422

Unfilled pauses (medial) 53 118–2429 740

Total 68 91–3287 802

Table 4.9: Study 3: Frequency and length of pauses in responses with two postverbalarguments.

(13%) fell below the 250ms cut-off, 16 (30%) were shorter than 500ms, and 44 (83%)

were shorter than 1000ms. In the analysis below, I only included (as disfluencies)

unfilled pauses that were 500ms or longer. As McDaniel et al. (2010) argued (and

the distribution of the perceptible pauses in my data corroborates), this is likely a

reasonably conservative measure of pauses as speech disruptions in child data.

Restricting disfluent pauses to those over 500ms resulted in recoding 6 of the 58 re-

sponses with disfluencies as fluent. The remaining disfluencies were then categorized

according to their position in the utterance. When disfluencies occurred immedi-

ately before a postverbal argument or within the argument itself, that argument was

counted as disfluent (see 80-81). When disfluencies only occurred on or before the

verb (see 82), those utterances were categorized as “pre-argument only.”

(80) Disfluent themes:

a. Give a #[628ms] his #[1611ms] give #[1922ms] a plant to somebody.

(S22, 4;0, control condition)

b. He throwed the uh[270ms] package to a girl. (S04, 4;8, control condition)

c. She gave #[2429ms] the comb to the boy. (S06, 4;6, recipient-given)

4.3. RESULTS 151

Discourse condition

Disfluency type Control Theme-given Recipient-given Total

Pre-argument only 4 (36%) 2 (18%) 5 (45%) 11Theme 6 (43%) 1 (7%) 7 (50%) 14Recipient 11 (50%) 5 (23%) 6 (27%) 22Both arguments 3 (60%) 1 (20%) 1 (20%) 5

Total 24 (43%) 9 (17%) 19 (37%) 52

Table 4.10: Study 3: Distribution of disfluencies in responses with two postverbalarguments.

(81) Disfluent recipients:

a. Give a broom to uh[230ms] the man. (S23, 4;3, control condition)

b. She read it to um[1285ms] a boy. (S11, 4;0, theme-given)

c. He gave the plant to the (#[235ms]) to #[859ms] the #[1087ms] lady.

(S06, 4;6, theme-given)

(82) Pre-argument only:

a. She #[1689ms] throw it to the man. (S10, 4;1, theme-given)

b. He #[629ms] he showed the woman a star. (S21, 4;6 , recipient-given)

c. Um[733ms] she gave it to the man to brush his hair.

(S17, 4;1, theme-given)

When a response had both a pre-argument disfluency and a disfluency on one of the

arguments (n=7), it was grouped together with the disfluencies for that particular

argument. The distribution of the remaining 52 responses is provided in Table 4.10.

The distribution of these disfluencies supports the claim that disfluencies indicate

production difficulty. When the theme was given, the recipient was more likely to

be disfluent than the theme: 23% of disfluent recipients occurred in theme-given

condition, but only 7% of disfluent themes did. Similarly, when the recipient


was given, the theme was more likely to be disfluent than the recipient: 50% of

disfluent themes occurred in recipient-given condition, but only 27% of disfluent

recipients did. Also, the highest proportion of disfluencies overall occurred in

the control condition, where the children did not have the benefit of hearing either

postverbal argument prior to giving their response.

The disfluency data were collected primarily to test the hypothesis that utter-

ances with given-before-new indicate fewer processing difficulties than other orders,

assuming that placing given information first gives the speaker a processing advantage

by allowing them to mention the most accessible information first and save the less

accessible information for later. But this hypothesis is partially tied to the position

of the disfluencies in the sentence. If speakers need extra time to formulate the new

information, and therefore use given-before-new ordering, they might still produce the

new information disfluently after they have produced the given information. They

bought themselves some time, but that was insufficient to eliminate the difficulty.

The disfluent utterances in (79b) and (81b-81c) are potential examples of this. Of

course, the extra time may have been sufficient to avert the disfluency, so we need

not see disfluencies in sentence-final new information, but finding them there would

not invalidate the claim that given-before-new facilitates production.

In light of this, my primary aim with the disfluency data is to test the follow-

ing hypothesis: Except for utterances in which disfluencies only arise after the first

postverbal argument, there should be significantly fewer disfluencies in utterances

with given-before-new ordering than in those with new-new ordering or new-before-

given ordering. According to this measure, 38 (21%) of the 179 utterances with

two postverbal arguments were disfluent. As expected, the smallest proportion of

disfluent responses (15%) was for responses with the given-before-new ordering. Re-

sponses with new-before-given ordering had the second highest proportion of disflu-

encies (21%), and new-new responses (i.e., the responses in the control condition)

4.3. RESULTS 153


given-before-new -1.0724 0.4845 0.3422 0.02687 *new-before-given -0.5338 0.4979 0.5864 0.28363 n.s.

Table 4.11: Study 3: Results of model predicting the presence of disfluencies.

were the most likely to be disfluent (30% disfluent). The fact that new-before-given

order shows fewer disfluencies than new-new order is also not surprising, because chil-

dren producing new-before-given order, still have the advantage that one argument

as been mentioned, even if they do not capitalize on that advantage by ordering that

argument first.

To test whether this difference is significant, I fitted a logistic regression model

with a disfluency factor (disfluent vs. fluent) as the binary outcome variable and

information structure (with the three levels mentioned above) as the primary predictor

variable. I also included construction choice (prepositional dative vs. double-object

dative), order, and age as control variables; but none of these were significant, so I

removed them from the model. I also included participant and verb as random effects.

The random effect for verb was not significant and was, therefore, also removed. The

results of the final model are given in Table 4.11. The model fit was acceptable

(C-statistic=0.82, Dxy=0.64, R2 = 0.96).

This model reveals that responses with given-before-new ordering were signifi-

cantly less likely to be disfluent than those with new-new ordering (the comparison

condition; i.e., responses in the control condition), while responses with new-before-

given order were not significantly different from those with new-new order. The

difference between given-before-new order and new-before-given order (15% vs. 21%

disfluent) did not reach significance. Thus, these data show some evidence that given-

before-new facilitates production (given-before-new utterances were significantly less

disfluent than new-new utterances), but they do not offer statistical confirmation of


the finding that given-before-new utterances were less disfluent than new-before-given

ones. This difference might prove significant if more data were included in the analy-

sis. At this point, we can say that given-before-new provides a processing advantage,

but the extent of this advantage remains unclear.

4.4 Discussion

The findings from this study confirm the primary results of Study 2A: Discourse

givenness influences how preschoolers order the two postverbal arguments of dative

verbs. The results of this study also allay concerns that the discourse effects evidenced

in Study 2A were due to differences in the visual stimuli or emphasis on the topicality

of the given information (see §3.2.3). In this study, the visual stimuli were held

constant across the discourse conditions, and children were never explicitly told that

the event was about the given information. This study also replicates the findings in

Study 2A that discourse did not influence all the verbs equally, and theme-givenness

had a more robust influence on syntactic choices than recipient-givenness. These

data also further address the role of verb semantics, frequency, and argument length

in dative construction choice and offer some preliminary support for a speaker-based

analysis of why children use given-before-new ordering.

Differences among verbs. This study systematically manipulated the semantic

class of the verbs and the frequency of the verbs in CDS (see Table 4.1). The frequency

manipulation was largely unsuccessful, though, because children often substituted a

different dative verb for the target verb (see Table 4.2). For the six verbs of caused

possession as well as for bring and take, children generally opted to describe the

event with the verb give. With the vignettes for throw (high-frequency), hurl (low-

frequency) and toss (low-frequency), children overwhelmingly described the events

with the verb throw (93% of the time). Aside from the vignette for throw, the one for

4.4. DISCUSSION 155

kick was the only one in the caused motion class that successfully elicited the target

verb. The low-frequency verbs loan and hurl were never produced, and the low-

frequency verb hand was only produced four times with both postverbal arguments

(see Table 4.5). The only low-frequency verbs produced fairly often were pass and

kick. Except for one use of kick, all of these responses were prepositional datives

(theme-first). These data do not offer any support for the hypothesis that children

are more likely to be influenced by discourse pressure with verbs when they are

relatively inexperienced with the verb’s argument structure (see the discussion of

entrenchment in §2.2.3 and §3.2.3).

But pass and kick may not be good representatives of low-frequency verbs. The

children seemed very comfortable with the verb kick, as evidenced at least in part

by the fact that they almost never substituted another verb for it. Perhaps the

children in my sample had already had ample experience hearing kick used in the

input. If so, there is a reasonably high likelihood that these uses of kick in the input

involved theme-objects and recipient-PPs (or other directional PPs), rather than

double-object datives like, Kick me the ball. Pass is also problematic given the shared

linguistic experiences of the children in this study. All the children attended the same

nursery school, where the daily snack time routine involves passing snacks around the

table. During this time, children are repeatedly asked (by the teacher) to pass the

apples, pass the Saltines, and so on. The recipient of this passing activity is rarely

mentioned—the general idea is that the snack should be passed around the table to

every child. When children want to have something passed to them, the generally

say something like I want an apple, not Please pass me an apple. In essence, this is a

high-frequency verb at least for the children in this sample, and they probably rarely

(if ever) hear it in a double-object construction.9 In the end, then, these data do not9Another possible concern with pass is that it can be used to describe throw-type events (e.g.,

Pass me the ball.). This was apparently not an issue, though. While children used pass for several of


allow us to assess whether children are more likely to use given-before-new ordering

with low-frequency verbs nor how frequency interacts with the semantic properties of

the event (i.e., caused possession vs. caused motion).

While the frequency manipulation failed, children did obligingly produce verbs in

both semantic verb classes (see Table 4.5), and verbs in the caused motion class were

significantly more likely to be used in prepositional datives (theme-first) than those

in the caused possession class. This is consistent with the view that the children

overwhelmingly interpreted these events as caused motion events, rather than change

of possession events, and, therefore, realized these verbs as prepositional datives (see

Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2008). In essence, the theme is construed as an object

moving to a goal (viz. the recipient), hence the appropriateness of the directional

to-phrase. Unlike the throwing event in Study 2A, though, these caused motion events

did not generally involve the type of routine ball play discussed in Section 3.2.3. The

event targeting kick involved a ball, but the events targeting throw, toss, and hurl

involved a box, a boot, and a hat, respectively. Consequently, these events are less

likely to have been experienced by the children. Nevertheless, they described these

events the same way they described those involving a ball. These results suggest that

the children’s caused motion verbs are less susceptible to discourse pressure and more

likely to be used in prepositional datives, regardless of whether the event represents

a typical throwing routine.

Responses for the vignettes targeting bring and take also deserve attention. De-

spite the fact that these verbs are very common in CDS (and in spontaneous child

speech), the children in this study essentially never produced them. The bring and

take vignettes were almost always described with the verb give (see Table 4.2). In

these vignettes, the agent walked a few feet with the theme in hand and then

the same events they also used give with, they never used it for the events involving ballistic caused

motion (throw, toss, hurl, and kick) (see Table 4.2).

4.4. DISCUSSION 157

gave the theme to the recipient. When describing these two events, children used

give with prepositional datives 66% of the time, while the other uses of give were

actually somewhat more likely to be prepositional datives (79% of the time). But

the added motion for the bring and take vignettes, may not have been particularly

salient to the children, since the agents only moved a few feet with the theme. This

might (in part) explain both why children did not more strongly prefer prepositional

datives with these events and why they substituted give for bring and take. More

likely, though, children avoided these verbs, because they require a particular deictic

context. Bring indicates movement toward and take movement away from the deictic

center—a central character, generally the speaker or addressee (Fillmore 1997:98-99).

The children’s avoidance of these verbs is reasonable given that the stimuli failed to

provide the necessary deictic relationships.

Givenness and the role of referring expressions. In Study 2A, the effect

of theme-givenness was categorical, whereas here it was gradient. Similarly, in

Study 2A, recipient-givenness had a weak but (marginally) significant influence

on construction choice, whereas in this study there were more double-object datives

(recipient-first) when the recipient was given, but not significantly so. This dif-

ference between the two studies, if meaningful, might be attributed to procedural

differences or even to differences in the vignettes themselves. Also, the addition of

more vignettes involving throw-type events may have reduced the likelihood of a ro-

bust effect for recipient-givenness. The children may have been more attuned to

attending to the motion of the theme, given the saliency of the theme movement in

the vignettes for kick, hurl, throw, and toss. Or perhaps producing more prepositional

datives in response to these events heightened the overall use of prepositional datives

and made children more likely to persist in that choice. Another possible reason is

that there were proportionally fewer responses with pronominal postverbal arguments


in these data than in those for Study 2A. At this point, we cannot rule out any of

the above explanations.

This difference aside, Study 3 replicates the finding that theme-givenness more

strongly affects construction choice than recipient-givenness. The reason for this

difference is likely related to the difference in how theme and recipient pronouns

are realized. In the responses with two postverbal arguments (excluding the verbs that

failed to alternate), 67% of given themes were pronominal, and 49% of given recip-

ients were pronominal. Recall that pronominal themes are only felicitous in prepo-

sitional datives (theme-first), while pronominal recipients are felicitous in both

constructions. This gives theme-givenness an a priori advantage over recipient-

givenness (see §3.2.3).

In Study 2A, givenness and pronominality were almost completely overlapping.

There were very few lexical NPs referring to given information and very few pronouns

referring to new information. In this study, there was still a robust correlation between

discourse condition and the choice of referring expression and very few pronouns

referring to new information, but there were more lexical NPs for given information

than in Study 2A. For the verbs that showed alternation, there were 17 lexical themes

in the theme-given condition. All but two of these—the responses with indefinite

given themes (see 77 and 76)—were realized in prepositional datives (theme-first).

Thus, when the theme was given, it was almost always realized in a prepositional

dative, even when it was lexical. Although the regression including pronominality

(see Table 4.7) did not show a significant difference between responses in the control

condition with two lexical arguments (the comparison condition) and those in the

theme-given condition with two lexical arguments, there was a higher proportion of

prepositional datives in the latter than in the former (88% vs. 76%).

As for recipients, when the recipient was given and pronominal, double-object

datives were significantly more likely than when the recipient was lexical and in

4.5. SUMMARY 159

the control condition. Pronominal recipients in the control condition were not

significantly more likely to appear in double-object datives than lexical recipients

in the same condition (though these were rather rare). Recipients may need to be

both given and pronominal to have a robust effect on word order. Perhaps with more

data, we would see a clear independent effect of both givenness and pronominality

in preschooler’s dative constructions, but the current data show (at the least) that

these two factors conspire together to encourage given-before-new ordering.

4.5 Summary

This study replicates the findings of the two previous studies that preschooler’s word

order choices are influenced by givenness, and it offers additional insight into the

question of whether this influence is direct or indirect (through the choice of referring

expressions). Apparently discourse has the strongest influence on word order when

the argument is both given and pronominal. Neither pronominality nor givenness

alone fully account for the results. This study also provides the best support so

far that semantic verb class can override discourse pressure to use given-before-new

ordering. Nevertheless, because the frequency manipulation was not fully successful,

we cannot rule out the possibility that the caused motion verbs were more resistant

to alternation because of verb-specific input patterns, rather than a general semantic

rule. Regardless, givenness clearly does not have a blanket effect on construction

choice, but interacts with a battery of factors that drive argument expression.

While the current data are consistent with both a speaker- and addressee-based

account for given-before-new ordering, the disfluency results provide some support

for a speaker-based account. The speaker-based account hinges on the notion that


using given-before-new ordering eases the speaker’s processing load.10 And the result

of the model predicting the presence of disfluencies confirms that given-before-new

orders were less disfluent than new-new orders. They were also less disfluent than

new-before-given orders, but not significantly so. Additional data are needed to show

conclusively that given-before-new ordering provides a substantial boost to processing

beyond the advantage gained by simply having heard one of the arguments mentioned.

The disfluency data also provide evidence that children process language similarly

to adults and that they signal processing difficulty in the same way. Though children

produced only a few filled pauses, these uses closely reflected the arguably subtle

difference between um and uh in adult language (see §4.1). If additional data corrob-

orate this difference in child language, this would provide new evidence that children

learn a wide range of subtle correspondences in the input, even when those are not

directly tied to referential meaning. In the next chapter, I bring together the results

of Studies 1-3 and further consider what the findings reveal about the extent to which

early syntactic choices are governed by learned correspondences, semantic properties

of the events and participants, communicative pressure, and processing factors.

10Of course, given-before-new might also lighten the addressee’s processing load, but my data do

not provide any measure of ease of comprehension (but see Clifton & Frazier 2004; Brown et al.

Submitted).

Chapter 5

Conclusion

5.1 Overview

The acquisition of word order is a complex problem, in part because children (like

adults) integrate information from multiple sources during production. This disser-

tation opens a window onto that complexity. Based on the results of three elicited

production studies, I have argued that givenness (specifically, explicit mention in the

immediately prior discourse) influences early word order choices. Previous work has

suggested that this is true for the choice of syntactic subject (Braine et al. 1990;

Braine & Brooks 1995), but my studies show that it is true for the choice of object as

well. Together, these studies provide converging evidence that young children attend

to givenness and use that information in formulating their utterances.

These findings are important in light of previous claims that children begin to

mark information status via referring expression quite early, but do not manage to

do so with word order until well after preschool (see §1.4). Based on data from

English locative and dative constructions, I have argued that preschool children use

word order in addition to referring expressions to mark givenness. In sum, I have

addressed the following questions:

161

162 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION

(83) a. Do children use given-first or new-first ordering?

b. Are all verbs equally affected by givenness?

c. Are all arguments equally affected by givenness?

d. Are givenness effects attributable to the type of referring expressions?

e. Why do children use given-before-new ordering?

This chapter provides a summary of my arguments as they relate to each of these

questions.

5.2 Do children use given-first or new-first ordering?

In all three of my studies with preschoolers, givenness was a significant predictor

of construction choice, and the preferred order was consistently given-before-new.

My data provide no evidence for a (non-adult-like) new-first preference. Some other

developmental work, however, indicates that young children use new-first ordering in

contexts where adults prefer given-first ordering (see §1.4.2). Perhaps the clearest

case for this is the work on conjunct ordering by Narasimhan & Dimroth (2008).

These researchers found that German-speaking three- and five-year-olds preferred

new-before-given ordering. In their tasks, the experimenter, who could not see the

visual stimuli, asked participants to label an object in a transparent cylinder (e.g., a

spoon). Afterward, another item (e.g., a ball) was added to the initial item in the

same cylinder, and again the experimenter asked the participant, Was ist da drin?

(‘What’s in there?’). In responding to this question, children were significantly more

likely to mention the newer item first and the older item second (e.g., a ball and a

spoon), while caregivers preferred the opposite ordering.

This study differs from mine in many ways. One important difference might be

the linguistic phenomena tested (conjunct ordering vs. argument ordering; see Bock

5.2. DO CHILDREN USE GIVEN-FIRST OR NEW-FIRST ORDERING? 163

& Warren 1985). For example, if children use given-before-new ordering to ease the

processing load, they may need this facilitation more with argument ordering than

conjunct ordering. When describing the filmed vignettes in my study, children had

to juggle multiple event participants and sort out the roles of those participants. In

the conjunct ordering task, though, children needed only to label the objects, all of

them familiar items. Perhaps this task failed to tax the processing system in a way

that would motivate given-before-new ordering, leaving room for a competing bias to

influence syntactic choices (e.g., a bias to attend to new items).1

Similarly, if children use given-before-new ordering to facilitate comprehension,

perhaps they recognized that their utterances would be easy to comprehend with

either ordering, so there was no need to observe the Given-New Contract (see §1.5.1).

Another potentially important difference is that the referents for the given and new

information were generally in the visual scene the same amount of time in my studies,

whereas the discourse-new item was new to the visual scene in the conjunct study.

This difference could have substantially increased the salience of the new argument,

neutralizing or overriding prominence brought about by the initial labeling.

Importantly, though, the labeling task, unlike my tasks was not embedded in

a coherent discourse. Participants labeled one item and subsequently labeled two

items, each time answering the same question (What’s in there? ). The two labeling

instances were not obviously part of the same conversation. In a follow-up study

in which this task was embedded in a coherent discourse, Narasimhan and Dimroth

found that four- and five-year-old children no longer showed a preference for new-

before-given (nor one for given-before-new) ordering (Narasimhan & Dimroth 2009;1One caveat here is that adults in this study were more likely to use given-before-new ordering—

obviously not because they had more difficulty retrieving the referent of the new item. But adult

performance could be based on other processes as well. Even if adults do not need to use given-

before-new ordering to facilitate production, they may do so because they have learned a preference

for this ordering through ample experience with more complex linguistic phenomena.


Dimroth & Narasimhan 2010). Alongside my results, the differences in these two

conjunct ordering studies suggests that children need both a conversational context

and a situation that taxes production and/or comprehension (at least to some extent)

to capitalize on the given-before-new ordering strategy.

5.3 Are all verbs equally affected by givenness?

Different verbs showed different levels of susceptibility to discourse-pressure. Some

verbs showed given-first patterns of alternation (e.g., squirt, fill, give), while others

essentially never alternated (e.g., pour, throw). Discourse-driven alternation patterns

were found with verbs that are low-frequency in child-directed speech (CDS), whether

they allow alternation in adult speech (e.g., squirt) or not (e.g., fill). Given-before-

new ordering was also found with high-frequency verbs, but only those that show

alternation in CDS (e.g., give), and not with those that do not (e.g., pour, throw).

In light of these findings, I have argued that children do not learn given-before-new

ordering on a verb-by-verb basis, but they may well learn to resist given-before-new

ordering on a verb-by-verb basis. In other words, children choose constructions that

yield given-before-new ordering unless a stronger pressure (like evidence from usage-

based patterns) demands a different choice.

In addition to patterns of usage, semantic properties of the verbs may also override

any pressure to use given-before-new ordering. In the dative studies, children strongly

preferred prepositional dative constructions (theme-first) with verbs of caused mo-

tion, and in particular with events involving ballistic motion. This result is consistent

with the idea that when children interpret an event as a caused motion event, they

(presumably like adults) describe these events with prepositional dative constructions

and reserve double-object dative constructions for events of caused possession. Al-

ternatively, children may have learned from the input that these verbs rarely occur

5.4. ARE ALL ARGUMENTS EQUALLY AFFECTED BY GIVENNESS? 165

in double-object dative constructions. Regardless, properties of the individual verbs

(and perhaps of semantic classes of verbs) must be considered in any investigation of

how discourse influences argument structure. Verb-specific properties (be they seman-

tic, distributional, or both) can mask or nullify potential discourse effects. Givenness

is just one piece of the argument structure puzzle.

5.4 Are all arguments equally affected by givenness?

Givenness did not have a blanket effect on postverbal arguments either. In my

locative data, locatum-givenness was a significant predictor of construction choice,

but location-givenness was not. I have argued that this asymmetry was due to

discourse-external sources of prominence. In particular, the locatum, as the mov-

ing item in the visual scene, was more prominent (visually and/or conceptually) than

the location, which was stationary throughout (see §2.2.3). Thus, children (and

adults) were faced with a cue clash: When the location was given, the discourse

context indicated that the location was more prominent, but discourse-external

factors indicated that the locatum was more prominent. So the two sources of

prominence clashed, and the potential effect of discourse was cancelled out, yielding

syntactic choices that were no different from the baseline. But in the locatum-given

condition, discourse-prominence aligned with discourse-external prominence, and the

locatum was significantly more likely to be ordered first.

In the dative data, theme-givenness had a more robust influence on word order

than recipient-givenness. In Study 2A, both theme-givenness and recipient-

givenness were reliable predictors of construction choice, but theme-givenness had

a categorical effect, and recipient-givenness a gradient one. In Study 3, theme-

givenness was a robust (though not quite categorical) predictor of construction choice.

The effect of recipient-givenness did not reach significance, though there were more


double-object dative constructions (recipient-first) when the recipient was given

than in the control condition. The difference between theme- and recipient-

givenness is not easily attributable to a clash between discourse-external and -internal

sources of prominence. If anything, recipients (by virtue of their humanness) should

have been more visually/conceptually prominent than themes (all inanimate), yield-

ing a cue clash in the theme-given condition, not in the recipient-given condition.

I have argued that the difference between theme- and recipient-givenness is due

to an asymmetry in pronoun realization patterns. In American English, recipient-

pronouns can felicitously occur in either the first or second postverbal argument

position, but theme-pronouns are only felicitous in the first position (see §3.2.3).

Because most given arguments were pronominalized, this difference in pronoun real-

ization can account for the advantage of theme-givenness over recipient-givenness

in influencing word order choices.

5.5 Are the effects due to referring expressions?

All of my studies reveal robust correlations between givenness and choice of refer-

ring expression in the speech of preschool children, and discourse-sensitive syntactic

choices often coincided with discourse-sensitive choices of referring expressions. These

findings were expected in light of the fact that word order and referring expressions

provide two ways of marking the same function—givenness. Given arguments tend to

be realized in the first postverbal argument position (given-first) and given arguments

tend to be pronominal (or definite NPs). The end result is harmonic alignment (Aissen

1999; Bresnan et al. 2007; Bresnan & Nikitina 2009; Bresnan & Ford 2010; de Marn-

effe et al. Submitted): The first postverbal argument tends to be given, short, and

definite, the second is more likely to be new, longer, and indefinite.

5.5. ARE THE EFFECTS DUE TO REFERRING EXPRESSIONS? 167

This alignment suggests that preschool children are well on their way to adult-like

production choices, but it also raises a difficult question: Does givenness influence

early syntax directly (given-first) or indirectly via some property of the referring

expressions (short-first and/or definite-first)? Although most work on givenness and

child language ignores this question (see §1.4), de Marneffe et al.’s (Submitted) corpus

study of give and show revealed that pronominality (length) significantly affected child

choices of dative constructions, while givenness did not. Specifically, prepositional

dative constructions (theme-first) were more likely when the theme was pronominal,

and double-object dative constructions (recipient-first) were more likely when the

recipient was pronominal. There was, however, no significant effect of theme-

givenness or recipient-givenness. De Marneffe and her colleagues argued that the

use of pronouns for new information in child speech might have masked any givenness

effects. For example, if children produce a pronominal theme when the recipient

is given, they are faced with two conflicting cues—the pronominality of the theme

encourages prepositional dative constructions (short-first), but the discourse status

of the recipient encourages double-object dative constructions (given-first). If the

pressure to use short-first ordering wins out in this cue clash, the use of pronouns for

new information would dilute any effects of givenness.

One difficulty in working with corpus data, though, is that discourse status is of-

ten difficult to assess. Naturalistic conversation takes place in settings where there is

substantial variation in the number of competing discourse referents, the contextual

salience of those referents, and their degree of givenness (e.g., number of mentions,

referring expressions used in prior mentions, etc.). These difficulties are exacerbated

with child data, because there is no established rubric for deciding under what circum-

stances children are likely to notice givenness in the surrounding discourse. While

elicited production studies have their own disadvantages, they have the advantage

that the discourse context and the situational context can be carefully controlled.


To my knowledge, my studies are the first to consider the influence of givenness and

type of referring expressions on the ordering of postverbal arguments in a controlled,

experimental setting.

What do the current data tell us about the effects of givenness and referring ex-

pression type on early word order? Across my studies, there was little compelling

evidence that definiteness of lexical arguments was driving the effect of discourse

givenness. Definite NPs were produced for given and for new information. If defi-

niteness (rather than givenness per se) were responsible for construction choices, then

definite NPs referring to new information should have been just as likely to occur

in first position as those referring to given information. But in every case in which

an argument’s givenness was a significant predictor of construction choice, definite

NPs for that argument were more likely to occur in first position if they referred to

given information than if they referred to new information. All three studies provide

some evidence that givenness has an independent influence on construction choice

and is not simply a by-product of a preference for definite NPs as the first postverbal

argument. In fact, once givenness is taken into account, there is rather little evidence

for any preference for ordering definite NPs first.

While the children’s syntactic choices are not reducible to NP definiteness, they

may be largely attributable to pronominality. Pronominal arguments (whether given

or new) were more likely than lexical ones to occur in the first postverbal position.

In fact, all pronominal themes occurred in the first postverbal position, as did all

but two of the children’s pronominal locatums. In Study 1A, locatum-givenness

was a significant predictor of construction choice, and 76% of given locatums were

pronominal. In the dative studies, theme-givenness was a significant predictor of

construction choice. In Study 2A, 83% of given themes were pronominal, as were 68%

of given themes in Study 3. Recipient-givenness was also a significant predictor of

construction choice in Study 2A, where 81% of given recipients were pronominal.

5.5. ARE THE EFFECTS DUE TO REFERRING EXPRESSIONS? 169

Because the majority of these given arguments were pronominal and very few new

arguments were, independent effects of givenness or pronominality are difficult to

assess. Across my studies, though, there was a (non-significant) tendency for given

arguments to be ordered first in the data excluding pronouns. In other words, even

when both postverbal arguments were lexical, given arguments were more likely to

be ordered first.

Beyond these findings, there were a few additional clues that the givenness effects

are not reducible to pronominality (short-first). In Study 2A, 67% of pronominal

recipients that referred to given information occurred in the first postverbal position

(n=18), compared to only 14% of those that referred to new information (n=7). Also

in Study 3, where given recipients showed a non-significant tendency to occur in

the first position, a regression crossing discourse condition with referring expression

type revealed that recipients were significantly more likely to be positioned first

only if they were both given and pronominal.

Because of the sparsity of lexical arguments referring to given information, I can-

not tell whether givenness would have robustly influenced syntax had it not been for

the increase in pronominality. Since pronominality and word order both mark given-

ness, when givenness is not marked via pronominality, it should not be too surprising

to find that it is not marked via word order either. Similarly, some caution is advisable

in assuming that the type of referring expression is chiefly responsible for the syntac-

tic choices in cases where givenness and choice of referring expression fail to overlap

(e.g., the occasional uses of pronouns for new information; but cf. Anttila et al. In

press). Something is presumably responsible for the choice of referring expression in

these cases as well. When pronominal arguments for discourse-new information were

ordered first in my data, some factor other than discourse givenness may have led to

the choice of referring expression and the choice of word order. Further research is


needed to determine whether this is the case and what that factor might be. Never-

theless, while it may be tempting to “avoid pesky questions” raised by pronominality

(Snyder 2003:52), researchers who choose to ignore pronominal data cannot ignore

the issue of pronominality altogether. My data highlight the strength of the tendency

to realize discourse-given arguments as pronouns. Whatever else causes speakers to

mark (or not mark) givenness via pronominality may well have the same effect on

their tendency to mark givenness via word order.

5.6 Why do children use given-before-new ordering?

In Chapter 1, I outlined three possible explanations for why children might use given-

before-new ordering: (i) to ease comprehension (an addressee-based approach), (ii)

to ease production (a speaker-based approach), or (iii) because they learned this

convention from the input and want to replicate it in their own speech (a statistical-

learning approach). Here again, though, a form and function problem arises. Each of

these three functions (viz. facilitation of comprehension, facilitation of production,

or reliance on conventions learned from the input) encourages production of the same

form (viz. given-before-new ordering). Perhaps all three explanations together con-

tribute to early given-before-new ordering. Definitively eliminating any of them may

be impossible.

Nevertheless, my data yielded three clues that restrict the range of possible expla-

nations. First, children preferred to realize given information as the first postverbal

argument of locative verbs even when no other postverbal argument was mentioned

(see 84).

(84) Vignette: male actor squirts water on a towel

E: . . .What’s the boy doing with the towel?

Child (S12, 3;3): Squirting the towel.

5.6. WHY DO CHILDREN USE GIVEN-BEFORE-NEW ORDERING? 171

I have argued that an addressee-based approach cannot neatly account for this ten-

dency (see §2.2.3). In these cases, children do not wait to mention the new informa-

tion until the addressee has had a chance to retrieve the information already given.

Instead, they simply omit the new information altogether.

Second, in Study 1A, children showed the most robust tendency to order given

information first with the verb fill. Children produced errors (i.e., locatum-object

constructions) with fill 88% of the time when the locatum was given, but only 25%

of the time in the control condition. This finding indicates that children do not use

given-before-new ordering because of verb-specific patterns they learn from the input.

Child uses of given-before-new ordering may be an attempt to replicate more global

given-before-new patterns in the input, but if children learn this pattern on a verb-

by-verb basis, we should find it only with high frequency verbs that provide clear

evidence of discourse-driven alternations. Give and show might be good candidates

for such verbs (see de Marneffe et al. Submitted), but fill is not (see §2.2.3).

The disfluency data in Chapter 4 yield a third clue about the source of early given-

before-new ordering. If children use this order to facilitate production, we should find

evidence of facilitation when this order is used. Indeed, four-year-olds’ dative con-

structions were significantly more fluent when they involved given-before-new ordering

than in the control condition (new-new ordering). Given-before-new responses were

also more fluent than new-before-given responses, though not significantly so. If more

data support this finding, this would be compelling evidence that given-before-new

ordering substantially eases the child’s processing load. Even if given-before-new or-

dering provides a significant processing advantage, this does not prove that children

actually use this ordering to facilitate processing. But these data do lay some of the

groundwork necessary to make a case for a speaker-based approach.2

2Of course, evidence that given-before-new ordering facilitates processing for the speaker might

also be taken as support for the claim that it facilitates processing for the addressee as well.


While determining the precise motivation underlying given-before-new ordering is

difficult, this issue has important implications for our understanding of how children

move toward more adult-like production choices. If given-before-new ordering is a by-

product of processing limitations, then we can expect to find this ordering preference

in even younger children as long as other factors (like syntactic complexity) do not in-

tervene. The studies of transitivity alternations by Braine and his colleagues provide

some support along these lines (Braine et al. 1990; Braine & Brooks 1995). Alterna-

tively, if children use given-before-new ordering primarily to facilitate the addressee’s

comprehension, this skill should improve with age as children gain a better under-

standing of the needs and perspective of their addressee. Similarly, if children use

given-before-new ordering to replicate global conventions in the input, this preference

should increase with increased linguistic experience.

My studies do not show a clear developmental trajectory. Study 1A tested three-

and five-year olds and Studies 2A and 3 tested four-year-olds. Regardless of how

age was coded, my data yielded no interaction between age and discourse condition.

In other words, younger children and older children showed the same preference for

given-before-new ordering. This may be taken as support for a processing account,

or it may simply indicate that children in this age range are all at about the same

stage of development in ability to mark givenness via word order. Studies of children

belonging to a larger age range may be needed to determine the developmental course

of this discourse sensitivity. Regardless, my studies show that the syntactic choices

of children as young as three reflect an adult-like sensitivity to givenness, even the

givenness of postverbal arguments. This suggests that previous studies have under-

estimated (i) the ability of young children to mark givenness via word order and (ii)

the potential for early argument structure errors to be discourse-driven (see §1.4).

In the end, my results underline the fact that preschool children can and do

integrate information from multiple sources as they process language for production.

5.7. ADDING NEW INFORMATION TO THE DISCOURSE 173

Like adults, children take information from the grammar, patterns of language use,

the properties of the event, and properties of the situational and discourse contexts

into account when they formulate their utterances. Regardless of the final word

on what drives given-before-new ordering, these studies add to a growing body of

evidence pointing toward continuity in how children and adults process language for

production (e.g., Bannard & Matthews 2008; McDaniel et al. 2010; de Marneffe et al.

Submitted).

5.7 Adding new information to the discourse

This dissertation provides insight into the development of both information structure

and argument structure, but much remains to be done. While I have considered

two linguistic manifestations of discourse-sensitivity (viz. choice of word order and

choice of referring expression), these do not exhaust the linguistic tools for marking

givenness. Intonation patterns are also highly indicative of information structure,

at least in adult speech (e.g., Firbas 1966; Halliday 1970; Prince 1981). To date,

there are very few studies that consider whether young children use intonation in

an adult-like way to mark discourse givenness (but see Bates 1976; Grünloh et al.

In prep.). An analysis of the intonation contours children use for given versus new

information could provide additional insight into the range of devices preschoolers

exploit in marking information status. Once all of these tools are taken into account,

researchers will have an excellent basis for assessing not only whether children mark

givenness in an adult-like way, but also under what circumstances they choose one

marker over another, or choose to exploit multiple markers simultaneously.

Because my studies only manipulated discourse givenness, they do not reveal what

kinds of givenness have the strongest impact on early word order (see §1.4). Discourse-

givenness (linguistic copresence) may be a more important determinant of word order


than physical copresence (cf. Campbell et al. 2000), but my data do not address this

issue. Givenness might also play a stronger role in some communicative contexts

than others (e.g., story telling vs. general conversation). Because the conversational

context was held constant within my studies, this question remains unanswered. My

studies also leave open the question of whether the degree of givenness plays a role in

how children use argument structure to mark information status. Mentioning an item

more or fewer times might also influence child ordering preferences. The field is ripe

for further investigation into the factors that influence early word order choices. In

the end, I suspect that our best efforts will support the conclusion of Bates (1976:200):

“[T]he acquisition of word order probably reflects an interaction of internal pragmatic

and semantic constraints, and high frequency environmental models, all competing

for limited channel use during communication.”

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