Wishes before ifs: mapping “fake” past tense to counterfactuality in wishes and conditionals

Counterfactuals express alternatives that are contrary to the actual situation.In English, counterfactuality is conveyed through conditionals (“If pigs had wings, they could fly”) and wish-constructions (“I wish pigs hadwings”), where the past tense morpheme marks non-actuality rather than past temporal orientation. This temporal mismatch seemingly complicates the already challenging task of mapping abstract counterfactual meaning onto these linguistic expressions during first language acquisition. In this paper, we investigated the role of linguistic transparency on the acquisition of different counterfactual constructions with a corpus study on the spontaneous production of English-speaking children between the ages of 2-to-6. We extracted wish-utterances from 52 corpora available on CHILDES to compare children’s wish productions with those of adults, and additionally extracted counterfactual conditional utterances for 6 children to provide a comparative longitudinal overview of counterfactual wishes and conditionals. Our results support the idea that complexity of form-to-meaning mapping influences the emergence of counterfactual language. First, we observed a substantial number of productive errors in children’s speech, where they produce counterfactuals with present tense marking instead of past. These errors are consistent with a stage where children have yet to figure out that the past tense is an obligatory component of English counterfactual constructions signaling a present non-actuality, rather than a past event on the timeline. Second, our results show that wish-constructions, which are linguistically more transparent than counterfactual conditionals, generally emerge before counterfactual conditionals in children’s speech. This suggests that in English, counterfactual wishes might be easier to acquire than counterfactual conditionals.&nbsp

On how to link child functional omissions to upwards reanalysis

Syntactic change research regularly appeals to the child innovator to explain upward reanalysis (V > v > infl; e.g., Roberts & Roussou, 2003; van Gelderen, 2004). In child language, the most pervasive type of syntactic input-divergence, or “error”, is the omission of functional morphemes (e.g., Brown, 1973; Snyder, 2007). Following Pannemann (2007), I argue that children learn language specific syntactic structures by assuming a Maximal Category First approach. Under this analysis, omission-laden child strings represent conservative interim structural analyses (rather than input-consistent analyses with unpronounced elements). When the child fails to revise her interim analysis to the input target, the resultant analysis will be upwards in nature (min>max), as predicted by the child innovator approach. This paper uses a corpus study of modal verbs (Cournane, 2015) to show that child functional omissions provide evidence for reanalyses up the verbal projection

La production épistémique chez l’enfant francophone : complexité syntaxique et ordre d’acquisition

Dans cet article, nous nous penchons sur la production d’occurrences épistémiques par des enfants francophones unilingues (n = 6, Paris Corpus, Morgenstern et Parisse, 2012) ainsi que leur mère (input – langue « modèle » utilisée par les parents). Nous adoptons une approche principalement syntaxique et nous concentrons sur les usages épistémiques des verbes modaux (pouvoir, devoir) et de certains adverbes (peut-être (que)), que nous comparons aux études antérieures analogues sur l’anglais et le serbo-croate. Nous montrons ainsi que les enfants francophones produisent, comme les enfants anglophones et serbo-croates, les ordres d’acquisition suivants : pour les éléments modaux, l’interprétation radicale vient avant l’interprétation épistémique ; et pour les éléments épistémiques, les adverbes viennent avant les verbes modaux (voir Bassano 1996). Nous émettons l’hypothèse que ces résultats peuvent être expliqués, du moins partiellement, par le lien existant entre la chronologie acquisitionnelle et la complexité syntaxique. Nos résultats contribueront à améliorer notre compréhension des mécanismes qui permettent aux enfants acquérant leur langue première de lier leurs pensées épistémiques à des formes linguistiques.This article examines epistemic language production of unilingual French children (n = 6, Paris Corpus, Morgenstern & Parisse, 2012) and their mother’s (input). Adopting a strongly syntactic approach, it focusses on epistemic usages of modal verbs (pouvoir, devoir) and a few adverbs (peut-être (que)), which are compared to results of previous studies on English and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS). Our corpus study shows that francophone children exhibit an order of acquisition which is identical to what is found in English and BCS: for modals, root interpretations are produced before epistemic ones, and for epistemic language, adverbs come before modals (see also Bassano 1996). We hypothesize that these results may be explained, at least partially, by the existing link between acquisition orders and syntactic complexity. This study contributes to the understanding of language acquisition processes that allow children to map epistemic thoughts to linguistic forms

CFcorpus

All data and scripts associated with Tulling & Cournane (2021

Modal Acquisition Studies

This project contains supplementary files for papers related to the NSF grant BCS#1551628 "Acquiring the language of possibility" (PI Valentine Hacquard (UMD), Co-PI Ailis Cournane (NYU)