Naslov
Language corpora and first language acquisition—A case study of the ditransitive construction

Autori
Proroković, Jakov ; Malenica, Frane

Izvornik
Applied Corpus Linguistics (2666-7991) 3 (2023), 1; 3, 13

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
ditransitive constructions, first language acquisition, corpus linguistics, CHILDES

Sažetak
Our paper investigates the mechanisms of language acquisition by observing the patterns of ditransitive construction usage in child language in terms of learnability, productivity and flexibility. The research we present in our paper is based on collected and annotated data from previous studies on English-speaking children, incorporated into the CHILDES language learner corpora, available via the Sketch Engine family of corpora. The paper underlines the applicability of corpus-based methodology in language acquisition research and its alignment with the usage-based models of language, ultimately presenting some of the major benefits of corpus-derived evidence for anaylsing the particularities of language development, specifically the English ditransitive construction. From the available dataset we extract the data on the “double-object dative” ditransitive construction (VP → NP1 → NP2) used by children and adults (age groups 0-3, 4-6 and 18 and over). Our main focus are the lexical and structural aspects of the ditransitive constructions, i.e., the typological analysis of ditransitive constructions and the frequency evaluation of different verbs and substantives used in them. The results reveal the following features of children’s language when compared to the adult groups: (1) more complex syntactic patterns take up a larger portion of ditransitive uses in the adult group but the relative resemblance in the order can be observed across age groups ; (2) there is a clear overlap across age groups when it comes to frequent choice of verbs used in the ditransitive construction ; (3) although we expected child language to be less schematic (less different types of arguments restricted to particular verbs), there seems to be very little difference in terms of schematicity of ditransitive constructions.

Izvorni jezik
Hrvatski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA