To get or to be? Use and acquisition of get- versus be- passives: evidence from children and adults

The use and acquisition of the get-passive has so far yielded a variety of accounts and suggestions. This paper presents new experimental evidence concerning the use and the acquisition of the get-passive by children, as well as adult judgments of get- and be-passives. Within a prototype approach to the passive, experiments investigated when 2–4-year-old British children produce get- as opposed to be-passives. The role of direct affectedness of the patient on get-passive production was investigated further in a follow-up experiment. In addition to the child data, ratings of get- and be-passives were obtained from British English adult speakers to investigate the acceptability of these passives and their relationship to developmental data. The first experiment showed that the chosen prototype approach clearly predicts children’s acquisition of be-passives with get-passives being more peripheral members of the category ‘passive’ than be-passives. The second study shows that even if the child herself is the affected patient in the play action, get-passives are only rarely produced. In contrast to American children, direct affectedness did not induce British children to produce a significant amount of getpassives. Last, adult ratings confirm that British English speakers rate be-passives consistently as better examples of passive sentences than get-passives. The evidence suggests that getpassives are more peripheral for British than for American children and adults. Implications for the possible role of parental input and the validity of existing accounts of the get-passive are discussed

Topicalization and the question of lexical passives in Chinese

This paper is one argument for a theory of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there are no grammatical relations beyond semantic roles, and no lexical relation-changing rules. As the passive rule is one of the most common relation changing rules cross-linguistically, in this paper I will address the question of whether or not Mandarin Chinese has lexical passives, that is, passives defined as in Relational Grammar (see for example Perlmutter and Postal 1977) and the early Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) literature (e.g. Bresnan 1982), where a 2-arc (object) is promoted to a 1-arc (subject)

The acquisition of Catalan passives with perception verbs

The current study focuses on the acquisition of Catalan passives with perception verbs since this type of verbs is key to know when passivisation is mastered since no adjectival interpretation strategy can be applied. The experiment carried out tested children from ages 4 to 10 about the comprehension of passives with perception verbs. Our results show that Catalan speaking-children have only mastered passivisation at the age of 9. These results are in line with previous studies done about passives in the sense that there is a delay in the acquisition of passives compared to that of the actives.El present treball es centra en l'adquisició de passives del català amb verbs de percepció perquè és precisament aquest tipus de verb el que determina l'edat en que les passives s'han adquirit perquè no permeten una interpretació adjectiva. L'experiment dut a terme va comptar amb nens de 4 a 10 anys i analitzava la comprensió de les passives amb verbs de percepció. Els nostres resultats mostren que els nens catalanoparlants només comprenen les passives de percepció als 9 anys. Aquests resultats coincideixen amb estudis anteriors sobre passives en el sentit que hi ha un retard en l'adquisició de les passives en comparació amb les actives

A paradox of syntactic priming: why response tendencies show priming for passives, and response latencies show priming for actives

Speakers tend to repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. Although it has been suggested that repeating syntactic structures should result in speeded responses, previous research has focused on effects in response tendencies. We investigated syntactic priming effects simultaneously in response tendencies and response latencies for active and passive transitive sentences in a picture description task. In Experiment 1, there were priming effects in response tendencies for passives and in response latencies for actives. However, when participants' pre-existing preference for actives was altered in Experiment 2, syntactic priming occurred for both actives and passives in response tendencies as well as in response latencies. This is the first investigation of the effects of structure frequency on both response tendencies and latencies in syntactic priming. We discuss the implications of these data for current theories of syntactic processing

Passives in first language acquisition: What causes the delay?

The passive construction is a late acquisition in child language. In this paper I evaluate the claim that difficulty with noncanonical semantics, rather than non-mature subject-object A-chains, underlie young children’s poor performance on the passive. In a series of truth-value judgment tasks, 4- and 5-year-old English-speaking children were tested on their comprehension of matrix passives and passives embedded under raising-to-object (RO: want, need) and object control (OC: ask, tell) verbs. RO passives (Olivia wanted/needed Scott to be kissed by Misha) entail object-subject-object A-chains, but allow semantic patients to surface as syntactic objects; OC passives (Olivia asked/told Scott to be kissed by Misha) and matrix passives (Scott was kissed by Misha) involve similar A-chains but do not result in this syntactic-semantic configuration. I found that although 4-year-olds failed to comprehend matrix passives and passives embedded under OC verbs, they correctly interpreted passives under RO verbs. (5-year-olds performed above chance in all tasks.) I propose a “semantic scaffolding” account of children’s comprehension of the passive that rests on the prototypicality of subjects being agents and objects being patients, arguing against the view that difficulty with passives results from an inability to form A-chains

Early production of the passive in two Eastern Bantu languages

The passive construction is acquired relatively late by children learning to speak many languages, with verbal passives not fully acquired till age 6 in English. In other languages it appears earlier, around age 3 or before. Use of passive construction in young children was examined in two Eastern Bantu languages spoken in Kenya (Kiswahili and Kigiriama), both with frequent use of passive. The passive was used productively very early (2;1) in these languages, regardless of the method used to measure productivity. In addition non-actional passives, particularly rare in English and some other European languages, were seen at these early ages. The proportion of verbs that were passive varied between individuals, both in children's speech and in the input to children. Pragmatic and grammatical features of the passive in some languages have previously been suggested to drive early passive acquisition, but these features are not found consistently in the two languages studied here. Findings suggest that the relatively high frequency of input found in these languages is the most plausible reason for early productive use of the passive

On the perspectivization of a recipient role - cross-linguistic results from a speech production experiment on GET-passives in German, Dutch and Luxembourgish

The focus of this paper is the perspectivization of thematic roles generally and the recipient role specifically. Whereas perspective is defined here as the representation of something for someone from a given position (Sandig 1996: 37), perspectivization refers to the verbalization of a situation in the speech generation process (Storrer 1996: 233). In a prototypical act of giving, for example, the focus of perception (the attention of the external observer) may be on the person who gives (agent), the transferred object (patient) or the person who receives the transferred object (recipient). The languages of the world provide differing linguistic means to perspectivize such an act of giving, or better: to perspectivize the participants of such an action. In this article, the linguistic means of three selected continental West Germanic languages –German, Dutch and Luxembourgish– will be taken into consideration, with an emphasis on the perspectivization of the recipient role

Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: how real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit? Evidence from the history of late Sanskrit passives and pseudo-passives

by Pāṇinian grammarians and the forms and constructions that are actually attested in the Vedic corpus (a part of which is traditionally believed to underlie Pāṇinian grammar). Concentrating on one particular aspect of the Old Indian verbal system, viz. the morphology and syntax of present formations with the suffix ‑ya-, I will provide a few examples of such discrepancy. I will argue that the most plausible explanation of this mismatch can be found in the peculiar sociolinguistic situation in Ancient India: a number of linguistic phenomena described by grammarians did not appear in Vedic texts but existed within the semi-colloquial scholarly discourse of the learned community of Sanskrit scholars (comparable to Latin scholarly discourse in Medieval Europe). Some of these phenomena may result from the influence of Middle Indic dialects spoken by Ancient Indian scholars, thus representing syntactic and morphological calques from their native dialects onto the Sanskrit grammatical system