The emergence of article functions in a German-Italian bilingual child:
Steps towards morpho-syntactic explicitness*
Tanja Kupisch
University of Hamburg, Research Centre on Multilingualism
1. Introduction
Articles, although they are function words, appear relatively early in children’s speech
production. Most Italian-learning children have been shown to produce articles or articlelike fillers several months before their second birthday (e.g. Pizzutto and Caselli 1992,
Bottari, Cipriani & Chilosi 1993/1994, Antelmi 1997). German-learning children, by
contrast start to produce articles only towards the end of their second year or even later
(see Lleó 2001, Kupisch 2004). Article omission in obligatory contexts tends to decrease
below the level of 10% before the children reach their third birthday (e.g. Chierchia,
Guasti and Gualmini 1999, Pizzutto and Caselli 1992, Caselli Leonard, Volterra and
Campagnoli 1993, Kupisch 2004 for Italian1; Penner and Weissenborn 1996, Eisenbeiss
2000, Kupisch 2004 for German). Depending on the target-language, it may take a long
time until the full morphological paradigms are acquired. For instance, the three Italianlearning children examined by Pizzuto and Caselli (1992) started to produce articles
before they reached their second birthday, but only for the feminine singular form la the
acquisition criterion of correct suppliance in 90% of all obligatory contexts was reached
before age 3;0 by all children.
This work attempts to go beyond a quantitative description of article use, and it
will not be concerned with the acquisition of the morphological functions gender,
number, and case either. Rather, it deals with the question whether article forms are used
in variation to encode semantic and pragmatic functions; i.e. functions which are related
to (i) the lexical properties of the denoted entities, (ii) the contextual conditions in which
an entity is referred to, and (iii) the knowledge of speaker and hearer about the intended
referent. Since it cannot be taken for granted that children and adults have the same
means to encode particular functions, related questions are (i) what functions are
associated with a particular form that is considered to be a determiner in the grammar of
an adult, and (ii) which means are used by the child to determine a particular referent so
that it is identifiable for her interlocutor.
Gisela Berkele wrote an excellent Master’s Thesis on the acquisition of determiner functions. Her work is
available in the library of the Faculty of Romance Languages at the University of Hamburg, but
unfortunately it has never been published. I wish to thank her for inspiring and motivating my own work on
this topic. I am grateful to Tom Roeper for extensive discussions on some of the issues presented here, and
to participants of the Colloquium on the Interaction of Language Components in Bilingual Acquisition, in
Hamburg in April 2005. Thanks to Katja Cantone for her disposition to reconstruct the play contexts with
me, and especially to Marta and her family for making our research team welcome and assisting us in the
data collection. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the German Science Foundation (DFG).
1
The results by Pizzuto and Caselli (1992) and Caselli et al. (1993) differ from the other studies in that
Italian articles are acquired only after the age of three. However, their acquisition criterion was not 90% of
suppliance in obligatory contexts, but 90% of correct suppliance in obligatory contexts, i.e. they also
controlled whether the form was morphologically correct.
*
1
Article variation is a means to express very fine-grained semantic and pragmatic
distinctions, which adults implicitly know. I will show that children acquire these
distinctions in a stepwise fashion. The functional approach to the analysis of child data is
advantageous in allowing us to interpret and understand “target-deviant” uses in terms of
their “functions” rather than classifying them as “ungrammatical”. In this contribution, I
am attempting to modulate the dynamic process of article acquisition, which, in my view,
consists in a gradual extension of the range of functions expressed by particular forms,
and which results in a morphologically and syntactically explicit way of expressing
object reference.
Articles are free standing morphemes that are inserted before nouns to meet the
syntactic requirements of a language. While article omission is a typical phenomenon in
child speech, adults tend to insert articles whenever required by the target-syntax.
Articles are means which allow us to be syntactically explicit with respect to the object of
reference. Thus, in a language which has a highly grammaticalized article system, such as
Italian, object reference is morphosyntactically very explicit. Such a language may seem
to be more complex syntactically, with respect to articles, than a language which has no
articles. However, this complexity in the domain of syntax is outleveled in the domain of
pragmatics in the sense that identifying the intended referent in a given context is
facilitated. Vice versa, languages without articles appear to be less complex on the level
of syntax but more complex on the level of pragmatics. The following investigation will
illustrate that the child’s acquisition path proceeds from a pragmatically determined way
of referring towards a morpho-syntactically determined one. The data will be used to
evaluate current syntactic models that integrate semantic aspects of article use.
The plurifunctionality of articles renders the examination of naturalistic data
particularly challenging. Therefore, experimental studies have been largely preferred to
examine the development of article functions because they allow for the functions to be
isolated. So why not resort to experimental exclusively? Because comparisons of
naturalistic and experimental data reveal a discrepancy. Experimental studies seem to
suggest that children are aware of the functional differences associated with article types
from an early age, but it takes some years until they can express them systematically.
Researchers working on naturalistic data, by contrast, noted that children use articles
adult-like from the age of three, although they continue to make egocentric errors, case,
gender and number errors. Thus, according to naturalistic studies, children use certain
functions actively long time before experimental data would suggest. For these reasons,
preference was given to the examination of naturalistic data here. The study involves a
very careful analysis of the utterances and the context in which they have been produced.
Why study bilingual data? One may argue that the cognitive mastery of a
particular function does not guarantee its occurrence or production in the speech of
children because there are additional influences on article production, positive or negative
ones. I am thinking of factors such as prosody, functional load, or syncretism. In other
words, if one function does not occur simultaneously in both languages of a bilingual
child, this may suggest that there are other features besides the semantic ones, which
render the production of articles complex and cause a delay in production. Bilingual data
thus adds an interesting viewpoint to the study of articles in child speech. For the sake of
simplicity, the focus of this paper will be on the acquisition of Italian, but I will draw on
German data to provide the bilingual perspective.
2
The present contribution differs from most previous works on this topic in three
points. First, it is based on naturalistic rather than experimental data. Second, it looks at
the development of a child who grows up bilingually with Italian and German as her two
languages. Third, it covers a very early stage of acquisition (between 1;6 and 3 years).
2. Functional distinctions expressed in articles
In referring to articles, we tend to use the terms definite and indefinite. It is true that
definite articles are largely used to refer to specific entities, while nouns accompanied by
indefinite articles mostly refer to non-specific entities. However, there is no 1:1
correspondence. In fact, definite referring expressions may also refer to non-specific
entities (e.g. mi piace il vino ‘I like wine’), and indefinite referring expressions to specific
entities (e.g. ho visto un leone nel deserto ‘I saw a lion in the desert’). Therefore, I will
use the terms definite and indefinite merely as names for the grammatical forms
corresponding to English a and the. In the following I will summarize some semantic and
pragmatic distinctions that are encoded on articles in German and Italian. Note that,
unlike with morphological and syntactic article functions, there are no major crosslinguistic differences between the two languages. Differences mainly arise in the domain
of non-specific reference, and particularly with the generic function.
2.1 The deictic and the nominative function
Deictic reference is considered to involve the speaker using an indexical definite
expression, often together with paralinguistic markers such as finger pointing, eye gaze,
head nodding etc., e.g. Look at the/ that cat! Through the use of paralinguistic markers,
identification of the referent is possible even if several entities of the same class are
present. According to Karmiloff-Smith (1979), deictic reference is egocentric to the
extent that the addressee has to pay attention to these markers in order to pick out the
referent intended by the speaker. Acquisition studies have shown that deictic reference is
almost always accompanied by additional non-linguistic markers. When uttering a deictic
expression, a speaker tends to focus the object of reference rather than the addressee.
Another article function that occurs very early in acquisition is the nominative,
appellative or naming function; e.g. that’s a cat. Karmiloff-Smith (1979:46)
characterized naming as a descriptor function rather than a determinor function, because
an expression is not used to enable the addressee to pick out the intended, but to give
information about the class-membership of a referent already under focus of attention by
speaker and listener.
2.2 The distinction between specific- and non-specific entities
According to Maratsos (1974:446), a speaker makes specific reference or an addressee
understands reference to be specific, if he has in mind a particular member of the class.
Non-specific reference, on the other hand, signals that no member of the class is
instantiated. In adult German and Italian, the distinction between a specific member of a
class and any member of a class is expressed by the variation between definite and
indefinite articles (cf. (1) and (2)).
3
(1)
Hai visto il gatto oggi?
‘Did you see the cat today?’
(specific reference)
(2)
Una volta che cambio casa, voglio avere un gatto.
‘Once I move, I want to have a cat.’
(non-specific reference)
As mentioned above, not all indefinite noun phrases automatically encode non-specific
reference. Some have clearly specific reference, as e.g. (3), while others may be
ambiguous between both readings, as e.g. (4).
(3)
(4)
Ieri, ho visto un gatto grigio.
‘Yesterday I saw a gay cat.’
Voglio avere un gatto.
‘I want to have a cat.’
(clearly specific)
(ambiguous)
Other means may help clarify the intended meaning, e.g. tense, adverbs, verb semantics,
preceding or following sentences, as illustrated in (5-6) (see also Grannis 1973).
(5)
(6)
Voglio avere un gatto. Il colore non importa.
(non-specific)
‘I want to have a cat. The color doesn’t matter.’
Voglio avere un gatto. L’ho visto ieri nella finestra di un negozio. (specific)
‘I want to have a cat. I saw it in the window of a shop.’
Some authors argue that non-specific reference should be distinguished from generic
reference, as in (7), because the former retains the notion of a potential instantiation
implying “any non-particular member of a class” as opposed to “no concrete instantiation
of a class” in the case of generics (e.g. Karmiloff-Smith 1979).
(7)
I gatti sono intelligenti.
‘Cats are intelligent.’
On the other hand, if we understand reference as a speech act which creates a link
between a linguistic expression and real world, as suggested by Korzen (1996), the two
uses become equivalent in terms of referentiality because no reference is established in
either case. In this work, I will adopt Korzen’s definition of reference, but I do agree that
there is a difference in meaning between non-specific reference on the one hand, as in (2)
and (5), and generic reference, as in (7), on the other hand.
2.3 Identifying function, anaphoric function, and exophoric function
The identifying, anaphoric, and exophoric functions are expressed by different article
types, but they have something in common which distinguishes them from the uses
hitherto mentioned, namely that their use requires to take into account the addressee’s
knowledge and perceptability of the referent.
4
Exophoric reference may be looked upon as involving the choice of a definite
referring expression when a referent is the only member of its class in the extra-linguistic
setting, while an indefinite noun phrase is chosen if the referent is one of several identical
ones in the given setting. The function requires consideration of the relation between
objects in the extra-linguistic context, but unlike the deictic function, it does not require
any additional non-linguistic markers. The following examples from a test on article-use
by Schaffer and De Villiers (2000:612) illustrate the difference:
(8)
Emily has got two pets, a frog and a horse. She wanted to ride one of them, and so
she put a saddle on it. Guess which / What was it? – The horse.
(9)
Three ducks and two dogs were walking across a bridge. One of the animals fell
off the bridge and said “quack”. Guess which / What was it? – A duck / One of the
ducks.
The identifying function involves the use of an indefinite article when a specific
referent is not identifiable or known for the addressee, although it is known by the
speaker. In other words, the referent cannot be presupposed. If I tell you I’ve seen the
gray cat yesterday, you may be puzzled because you do not know the gray cat I am
talking about. That is, a new referent has to be introduced into the discourse by means of
an indefinite referring expression, as in (10).
(10)
C’era un un piccolo anatroccolo che non sapeva nuotare.
‘There was a little duck who didn’t know how to swim.’
Once a referent has been established in discourse, it can be referred back to by a definite
referring expression. Noun phrases that are used to resume mention of a previously
introduced entity function as direct anaphors. For instance, the noun phrase un piccolo
anatroccolo in (10) functions as antecedent for the noun phrase il piccolo anatroccolo in
(11), which has an anaphoric function.
(11)
Il piccolo anatroccolo si sentiva giù ….
‘The little duck was sad ...’
Anaphoric reference is taken to involve exclusively linguistic procedures. It is used by
the speaker to hold discourse together and implicitly to inform the addressee that he is
keeping to the same theme of discourse (Karmiloff-Smith 1979:50). In naturalistic data
from children younger than three years, such contexts are rare. Children do refer back to
previously mentioned entities, but these entities tend to be present in the context.
3. Previous studies
3.1 The deictic and the naming function
The deictic and the nominative function constitute the first semantic and
pragmatic distinctions expressed in small children’s nominals.
5
Use of the indefinite article to nominate entities is very common in early
discourse between child and caretaker. Similar to Warden (1976), Karmiloff-Smith
(1979:65) finds that “at no age do children have difficulties in using the indefinite article
in the nominative function”. In her experimental design, children had to identify objects
which were hidden in bags. To elicit the naming function, one of several identical objects
was put into a bag, and the child was asked ‘What is in the bag?’. Children in the
youngest group (3;4-3;11) used no single definite expression, 7% of zero articles and
93% of indefinite articles (p.75).
The deictic function is the first function that children associate with definite
articles. Karmiloff-Smith even assumes that it is the only function mastered by three year
olds, and that children are unaware of other uses of definite articles, e.g. its use to
discriminate singleton objects from objects of which there are several identical ones (see
3.3). In the latter case, which would require an indefinite referring expression, they tend
to overuse definites, while, at the same time, trying to point at the objects. KarmiloffSmith argues that the definite article is a sort of demonstrative for the children.
Berkele (1983) casts another perspective on the acquisition of deictic reference,
namely that the deictic function per se seems to be acquired before children start to use
definite articles. The author examined object reference in the German-French bilingual
child Caroline, noting that she produces the form [la]2 “there/the” as early as 1;10.
However, [la] did not yet occur prenominally but exclusively in isolation. Clearly though,
the form had a referential, deictic function because it was used to draw the interlocutor’s
attention to objects. That is, children acquire the function prior to relating it to the
definite article. Once article use starts, the article-noun expression becomes a new form
to express an old function. In a similar vein, one may argue that children express the
naming function by using bare nouns before they use indefinite noun phrases.
3.2 The distinction between specific- and non-specific entities
When distinguishing between specific and non-specific entities, the article form
has to be selected in accordance with inherent semantic properties of the noun, i.e. it is
relevant whether the noun is count, mass, or abstract. At the same time, the article form
depends on whether an entity is conceptualized as a concept (type) or as referring to a
specific entity (token). This is because inherently countable objects may be construed as
non-specific (e.g. I like apples), and inherently uncountable entities may be construed as
specific objects (e.g. I bought this wine).
Piaget (1962) believed that small children have problems to abstract away from
image-based representations and to built up notions like classes and class membership.
He noted that his daughter used the term ‘the slug’ for the slugs they went to see every
morning along a certain road. “At 2;7;2 she cried: ‘There it is’ on seeing one, and when
she saw another ten yards further on she said: ‘There’s the slug again.’” (Piaget
1962:224). Piaget suggested that his daughter neither differentiated between one and
another individual member of a class, nor between an individual member and the general
class they belong to. Unlike Piaget, Bickerton (1981) argued that since the specific/ nonspecific contrast is marked in all Creole languages, children must be biologically
programmed to acquire it. At that time, empirical evidence for the mastery of the specific/
2
The French article la and the adverb là are homophonous.
6
non-specific contrast in child language was not as abundant as it may have appeared to
Bickerton3, but there is by now general agreement that this function is acquired early
compared to other determiner functions.
According to Brown’s (1973:355) naturalistic study, children control this
distinction somewhere between the age of 32 months and 41 months. Maratsos
(1974:448) questioned the relevance of Brown’s findings. Since they were based on
naturalistic data, “[s]pecific references were largely to referents in sight of speaker and
listener, non-specific reference to non-present referents”. In other words, Brown’s
children may have distinguished between visible objects as opposed to non-visible
objects rather than between specific and non-specific entities. However, Maratsos’
experimental studies confirmed that even the youngest children, i.e. three year olds, had
extensive knowledge of specific vs. non-specific reference, which they showed by
alternating between a and the (see also Maratsos 1976: 93-94).
Further proof for the early mastery of the specific/ non-specific contrast was
provided in subsequent naturalistic studies. Based on a longitudinal study of the bilingual
German-French child Claudine, Berkele (1983) suggested that between 2;4 and 2;7 there
was convincing evidence that Claudine had acquired the concept of specificity. She
uttered wo’s die bäbär? ‘where’s the bear?’ when looking for a particular bear, but ein
bär! ‘a bear’ in a situation in which she suddenly found a bear without expecting it.
Serratrice’s (2000) Italian-English subject Carlo started to use indefinite articles to refer
to non-specific referents from the age of 2;3 in Italian and from age 2;9,6 in English, i.e.
at a similar age as Claudine. Based on naturalistic data from 17 monolingual Englishspeaking children, Abu-Akel and Bailey (2000) report from the age of 24 months definite
and indefinite expressions were used discriminately in specific and non-specific contexts.
Thus, we may expect children to show article alternation to encode the specific/
non-specific contrast from an early age, especially in looking at naturalistic data.
3.3 Article functions depending on the addressee’s knowledge of the referent
3.3.1 The exophoric function
The exophoric function was studied experimentally by Karmiloff-Smith (1979).
In the respective task, the child had to ask a doll to lend her one of her toys. The doll
possessed various numbers of particular toys. Some of her toys were singletons, of others
there were several identical ones, so that the context for exophoric reference was
provided. The children were inclined to use demonstrative pronouns, even if they were
told the doll could not understand what she wanted to have, and although they were
placed far away from the toys to discourage the use of pointing gestures. The 3 year olds
(3;0-3;11) used definite referring expressions (demonstratives and definite noun phrases)
46% of the time. However, the answers were not discriminate because the children also
used definites incorrectly to refer to one of several differently colored objects (45% of the
trials) and one of several identical objects (39% of the trials), whereas indefinite
He cited evidence from Brown’s (1973) naturalistic data and from the experimental studies of Maratsos
(1974, 1976) and Karmiloff-Smith (1979). However, Karmiloff-Smith did not manipulate specificity in any
experiment, and non-specific reference was only elicited in one of the production tests conducted by
Maratsos, and the children’s overall success rate in this task was not 90% (as stated by Bickerton, p. 148),
but 79% (Maratsos 1976: 59) (see also Cziko 1986 for further points along these lines).
3
7
referential expressions were rarely used. Karmiloff-Smith (1979:71) concluded that “3
year olds mainly used demonstratives or definite referring expressions in a situation
which called for the distinctive use of definite and indefinite exophoric reference.”
3.3.1 The identifying function
The identifying function is the most extensively studied function in child
language. Children have been reported to overuse the definite article, treating objects as if
they were known to the hearer, although they are (i) neither present in the context, nor (ii)
previously introduced linguistically, nor (iii) part of the shared world knowledge of child
and addressee. Research on the identifying function can be traced back as far as to Piaget
(1955), who made children tell fairy tales to each other. He noted that: “The explainer
always gave us the impression of talking to himself, without bothering about the other
child. Very rarely did he succeed in placing himself at the latter’s point of view”
(1955:55). The incorrect use of the definite article in such contexts became known as
egocentric error and has since been reported in a number of studies (e.g. Brown 1973,
Warden 1976, Maratsos 1976, Emslie and Stevenson 1981, Power and Dal Martello
1986, Schaeffer 1999, Matthewson et al. 2001). Egocentricity means that the child
wrongly assumes the hearer to share his/her point of view.
Brown (1973:353) noted with respect to the English children Peter, Eve and
Sarah, that “it seems quite likely […] that the children had not learned to “decenter,” to
use Piaget’s term, from their own point of view to that of the listener when the two
diverged”. Warden (1976) conducted several experiments, covering a population of 3 to 9
year olds, as well as adults. In some experiments the subjects described simple action
events involving model animals to a blindfold experimenter; in other stories the subjects
narrated cartoon stories to each other. His results showed that adults identified new
referents prior to using the definite article, while children tended to use definite referring
expressions (54% in the group of three year olds), regardless of whether the referent had
been identified before. According to Warden, children under 5 years old fail to take into
account the addressee’s knowledge of a referent. Emslie and Stevenson (1981) repeated
Warden’s experiment with some technical improvements. They obtained a considerable
improvement of the results (13% of definite expressions in the group of 3 year olds).
Power and Dal Martello (1986) replicated the experiments with Italian preschool
children. Egocentric errors were quite common among the 3 and 4 year olds (40%), but
performance increased with age. The portion of egocentric errors fell from 40% to 18%
in the five year olds.
Serratrice (2000) and Berkele (1983) looked at naturalistic data in bilinguals
under three years of age. Serratrice noted that in some cases in which Carlo, an ItalianEnglish bilingual, used definite articles, adults would have been inclined to use indefinite
ones. She remarked that “previous contact with the book together with his adult
interlocutor is sufficient evidence for Carlo to identify […] that lion as a particular one
which is supposedly also familiar to his adult partner”. She assumes that the number of
definite articles is largely biased by the previously shared knowledge the child has with
his listener and by the deictic bias of the here and now of the situational context. Her
remark pinpoints the difficulty in identifying egocentric errors in naturalistic data, where
potential referents are largely present. Berkele (1983) finds the first uses of the
identifying function at the age of 2;7,6. She gives examples in which Caroline introduces
8
a new animal into an acted out story saying un ein bär auch ‘and a bear also’, or in which
she picks up a pair of glasses from the ground saying ich hab ein brille ‘I have a
glasses.SG’, or in which she drwas the interlocutor’s attention to the drawing of a clock
saying dadrauf is ein ticktack, lit.: ‘on there is a clock’. Again, the noun phrases refer to
objects which are present in the context and visible to the hearer, but they clearly go
beyond the function of indicating class membership. Since the child introduces or
“foregrounds” a previously unnoticed object, such noun phrases may be considered as
identifying, even though they refer to present objects.
I sum, the majority of the elicitation tasks have confirmed that children tend to
make egocentric errors, especially before the age of four. In naturalistic data, by contrast,
identifying indefinite articles were found prior to the age of three, although, at the same
time, children continue to make egocentric errors.
3.3.3 Anaphoric function
The anaphoric function has been examined in a number of experiments together
with the identifying function. Warden (1976), Emslie and Stevenson (1981) and Power
and Dal Martello (1986) made children narrate simple cartoon stories based on cards. In
Warden’s experiment, for example, each story comprised three sequential events, each
drawn on a separate card. Each referent occurred at least twice to test whether the child
would switch from indefinite to definite expressions on second mentions. The 3 and five
year old children used definite referring expressions in 90% of all cases. (Note however,
that the three year olds also used definites on first mentions in 54% of all cases). In the
experiment by Emslie and Stevenson (1981), 3 and 4 year olds used definite referring
expressions between 96 and 100% of the time, and they also used fewer definites on first
mentions (between 13% and 15%). Power and Dal Martello found that that 3 and 4 year
olds used definites in only 40% of all cases (see above), but there was a substantial shift
from indefinite to definite articles on second mentions (85%). They suspected, however,
that the shift from the indefinite to the definite article observed in some children may
have been due to a “speaker-centered rule”. In other words, the children may have used
the indefinite on first mentions because they were themselves unfamiliar with the
referent. Therefore, in a repetition of the experiment, they had children tell the story
twice to different people. As they had expected, significantly more egocentric errors were
made when the children narrated the story for the second time (60% of errors). Schaffer
and De Villiers (2000) conducted an experiment in which children were presented with
one- to two-sentence long stories without any contextual supports; all aspects of the
stories were imaged. Under the condition illustrated in (12), three year olds produced
definites 96% of the time.
(12)
Adrienne got a pet hamster for her birthday and put it in a nice cage. It tried to
escape so she quickly closed something. – What did she close? - The cage
(Schaffer and De Villiers 2000: 612)
The investigations suggest that children do not have particular problems in shifting from
indefinite to definite articles on second mentions, but some experimental results may be
biased by the fact that children tend to use definite articles already on first mentions.
Thus, it is important to control whether definites and indefinites are used discriminately.
9
4. The study
4.1 Data
The data presented here has been collected within the research project Bilingualism in
early childhood: Comparing Italian/German and French/German under the direction of
Natascha Müller. The project was part of the Collaborative Research Centre on
Multilingualism in Hamburg. The following investigation is based on a longitudinal study
of the bilingual German-Italian child Marta. Marta grows up in a bi-national family in
Hamburg, Germany. Her mother is Italian-German bilingual and speaks to her
exclusively in Italian; her father is German. Marta has a two year older brother. In the
period covered by this study, the children spoke together in Italian. The child went to a
German daycare, but at home the family tried to strengthen the Italian input. The father
sometimes spoke Italian as well, and Marta had an Italian-speaking nanny from Albania.
The girl’s linguistic development has been followed very regularly from an early
age (1;6), which ensures that the onset of article use has not been missed. The part of the
corpus that was analyzed for this study consists of 30 Italian and German recordings
each, and contains 4479 and 2949 utterances respectively4. Marta’s linguistic
development proceeds slightly faster in Italian. This is mirrored, for example, in a higher
number of comprehensible words. Before age two the mean number of comprehensible
utterances per recording is 33 in German and 92 in Italian. The contrast levels out with
increasing age. After age 2;0, the mean is 127 in German and 194 in Italian. The higher
number of utterances in Italian goes along with a faster growth of the noun and verb
lexicon (see Kupisch et al. 2005).
4.2 An overview of article-use and omission
Figures 1 and 2 display the distribution of article- noun sequences and bare nouns in the
child’s spontaneous speech in Italian and German. Incomprehensible or partially
incomprehensible article-noun sequences, mixed DPs, and target-like bare nouns have
been excluded from the counts. The columns represent absolute numbers, the shaded area
represents the rate of determiner omission in obligatory contexts.
In both languages, the child passes through a phase in which she predominantly
uses bare nouns. The distribution of bare nouns in Italian reflects a u-shaped pattern: At
first, the child uses few nouns overall (which happen to be bare). Until the age of 2 years,
the number of bare nouns increases with a growing overall number of nouns. From the
age of 2;3, bare nouns decrease with the number of determined referential expressions
increasing. There is no such clear u-shaped development in German. The overall number
of nouns (bare and determined) stagnates on a fairly low level for an extended period, as
the child speaks only little German. This does not produce major effects in the omission
rate, though. As expected based on what we know about monolingual acquisition, article
use starts later in German. The rate of omission decreases more slowly as well, but during
some stages there is no statistically significant contrast between German and Italian (see
4
The number was calculated by adding up the number of utterances in each recording session. Notice that
sì and no being counted once per recording.
10
Kupisch, in press). Another difference between Marta’s Italian and German noun phrases,
apart from the overall number, concerns the distribution of indefinite and definite articles.
While the definite article overweighs in Italian, the indefinite is used more in German.
However, this discrepancy partially reflects the target-patterns (see section 5).
bare nouns (%)
100
indefinite article+N
90
definite article+N
80
80
bare nouns
10
0
0
2;9,9
2;11,15
10
2;10,6
20
2;8
20
2;6,26
30
2;5,27
30
2;4,29
40
2;3,26
40
2;2,4
50
2;1
50
2;0,2
60
1;11
60
1;9,12
70
1;8,1
70
absolute number
90
1;6,26
omission in obligatory contexts
(%)
100
age
Figure 1: Article use and omission in Marta’s Italian
bare nouns (%)
100
indefinite article+N
90
definite article+N
bare nouns
80
80
0
0
2;11,29
10
2;10,20
10
2;9,22
20
2;8,26
20
2;7,7
30
2;6,10
30
2;5,12
40
2;4,16
40
2;2,26
50
2;1,21
50
2;0,16
60
1;11,21
60
1;10,2
70
1;8
70
absolute number
90
1;6,26
omission in obligatory contexts
(%)
100
age
Figure 2: Article use and omission in Marta’s German
11
4.3 Functional distinctions in Marta’s use of articles
The functional analysis of children’s early use of articles is complicated by the fact that
most noun phrases occur in isolation so that the extra-linguistic context provides the only
clue on the basis of which possible functions can be reconstructed. In fact, the first
article-like forms, or proto-articles5, appear while Marta is still in the one-word stage
(MLU < 1.5), meaning that whenever a noun is combined with another word, the other
word is likely to be an article or another kind of determiner.
4.3.1 The early stage: naming and deictic expressions
Children start to refer to objects before they use articles. Their referential means are
different from those of adults, though. From the first recording, Marta uses the adverb
qua (in the Italian recordings) to draw her interlocutors attention to particular objects,
such as toy animals or objects depicted in a book. Most of the time, the adverb is
accompanied by a paralinguistic marker. In the German recording parts, too, Marta uses
qua, but also the German adverb da ‘there’ and the determiner das ‘the/that’6. As noted
by Lyons (1975:65-66), the deictic expression may serve various functions: (i) to draw
the interlocutor’s attention to an object, (ii) to indicate which object it is that attracts her
attention, and (iii) to say something about the object (its location, that she wants to have
it, what it does). Concurrently, Marta uses bare nouns (e.g. pesce ‘fish’, cane ‘dog’,
cavallo ‘horse’) in referring to objects. Whether she names them or makes deictic
reference we do not know, as both functions may be accompanied by paralinguistic
markers, such as pointing. In other words, deictic reference and naming are inseparable
during this stage, and they do not involve the use of articles. The child does have a way
of referring to objects, but it is different from that of adults.
The period in which bare nouns, adverbs, and pronominal determiners are used to
refer to objects overlaps with the first use of articles. With increasing age, determined
noun phrases take over, while the use of bare nouns fades (see Figures 1 and 2). The first
article, il, occurs in Italian at 1;7. From 1;8 Marta uses both indefinite and definite Italian
articles. Usage in obligatory contexts increases steadily in both languages, but faster in
Italian. With a few exceptions, all noun phrases before age 2;0 are isolated, i.e. occur in
two-word utterances. Examples of definites in Italian include e.g. il cane (1;7) ‘the dog’,
na nuno [=la luna] ‘the moon’ (1;10), la pancia ‘the belly’ (1;11), le pape [=scarpe] ‘the
shoes’ (1;11); examples of indefinites are un treno ‘a train’ (1;9), un sorso [=orso] ‘a
bear’ (1;10), u(n) auto ‘a car’ (1;10), un cane ‘a dog’ (1;10). In German, there are very
few expressions containing articles before age 2;0 (N=4), e.g. das is eine mama ‘that’s a
mummy’, noch ein, quack ‘another frog’, (hier) eine muschel ‘(here) a shell’ (all 1;11).
Caution is needed when evaluating these earliest occurrences. The data suggest
that the definite article is used deictically, while the indefinite one is used in the naming
Some of Marta’s earliest noun phrases, especially in Italian, were preceded by proto-articles, such as [a]
for la, or by monosyllabic placeholders, such as [e] or [ә]. I included them in the quantitative analysis
(Figures 1 and 2) if they were clearly identified as proto-articles (and there are many unidentified
phonological sequences preceding nouns). For the analysis of semantic distinctions they are mostly
irrelevant because they give no clue to definiteness (German de and ei constitute exceptions).
6
Adverbs and determiners are largely selected from the language of the interlocutor. The exceptions mostly
occur in the German recordings.
5
12
function, and that both are acquired early. However, it should be kept in mind that most
naturalistic play contexts do not enforce one particular article type. Many contexts allow
for both articles to be used, except for responses to naming-questions.7 Whenever an
object is present in the communicative situation, it can either be referred to by a deictic
expression (guarda il gatto! ‘look at the cat!’) to draw the interlocutor’s attention to it, or
it can be named to indicate class-membership (guarda, un gatto! ‘look, a cat!’). In fact,
when Marta named something with an indefinite referential expression, she often
contemporaneously pointed to it, using a paralinguistic, deictic marker. Or she combined
the indefinite noun phrase with another deictic expression, such as guarda ‘look’, qua
‘there’, or questo ‘this’ etc. Therefore, it is plausible to assume that there is a functional
overlap of these functions in the child’s initial language.
4.3.2 The distinction between specific- and non-specific entities
The data reveals that the distinction between specific- and non-specific referents is
mastered shortly after the second year. Article variation between the deictic use (where
the has a determinor function in the sense of Karmiloff-Smith (1979:34)) and naming
(where a has no determinor but a descriptor function) is found even earlier. However, it
is not clear whether the latter two functions result from the knowledge of the semantics
encoded by a and the or rather from the knowledge that the expressions are used in
particular communicative settings (e.g. the routinized way of identifying an object), and
whether they are used discriminately (see discussion in 4.3.1). I am therefore hesitant to
interpret this variation as indicative of the mastery of the functions. Univocal indications
are found soon after the child’s second birthday, when nominal expressions start to be
used as arguments of lexical verbs. There were numerous instances of the case in which a
referent was nonspecific (for both child and listener). Subvarieties include negatives (e.g.
13-14), reference to any instance of the class (e.g. 15-19), and imagined referents (18-19).
(13)
(14)
(15)
(16
(17)
(18)
(19)
non è una chiocciola /
‘that’s not a ...’
das nich ein baby /
‘that not a baby’
leggiamo un libro /
‘let’s read a book’
prendo un pistone / [=pistola]
‘I take a ?’
dopo metto un cerotto /
‘later I put a band-aid’
jetzt machn wir noch ein haus /
‘now we make another house’
gleich kommt eine [s]lange und esst /
‘in a moment a snake comes and eats’
(2;3)
(2;6)
(2;3)
(2;7)
(2;8)
(2;11)
(2;11)
These occurrences are seen alongside with various categories of specific reference, in
which the referent was (i) unique in the world, as in il sole ‘the sun’ (2;0), il mare ‘the
sea’ (2;3), le stelle ‘the stars’ (2;5), la luna ‘the moon’ (2;6), der Weihnachtsmann ‘Santa
7
For example, questo, cosa è? ‘this, what is it?’- un gatto/ *il gatto ‘a cat/ the cat’). .
13
Claus’ (2;8), (ii) unique in the context, like la porta ‘the door’ (2;5), il letto ‘the bed’
(2;8), la finestra ‘the window’ (2;11), or (iii) made salient by looking or pointing at it,
e.g. guarda la volpe! ‘look the fox!’ (2;5), guck mal den elefanten! ‘look the elephant!’
(2;10) and numerous other instances. Other uniquely referring noun phrases are kinship
terms, such as lo zio ‘the uncle’, la mamma ‘mummy’, il papa ‘daddy’, il nonno ‘the
grandpa’. Some referents are specific because they constitute parts of objects that have
been introduced or that are immediately present and touched or focussed. Examples
include il naso ‘the nose’ (2;1), col braccio fa male ‘with the arm it hurts’ (2;5), mi fa
male il piede ‘my foot hurts’ (2;6,10), la coda ‘the tail’ (2;6), die nase ‘the nose’ (2;6).
Other cases in which the referent is clearly specific is in alienable possessives. Here, the
referent is identified anaphorically or cataphorically through the preceding or following
possessor, as in le babe tis [=le scarpe di Cris] ‘Cris’ shoes’ (2;2), la sedia mia ‘my chair’
(2;6), il mio ranocchio ‘my frog’ (2;7), la casa delle tartarughe ‘the house of the turtles’
(2;10).
Generic utterances with definite determiners, as illustrated in (20-24), started to
be used after 2;6. They were amazingly frequent compared outcomes of previous studies
(e.g. Serratrice 2000).
(20)
K: ce le ho anche io queste cose qua? 7 TOUCHES HER HEAD WHERE DEER HAS
ANTLERS ‘do I have them too these things?’
M: solo i cervi /
‘only deer’
(2;8)
(21)
non si pulisce con la scopa / PICTURE: CHILDREN CLEAN A BEAR WITH A BROOM
‘one does not clean (bears) with brooms’
(2;9)
(22)
vivono nell’acqua le conchiglie /
‘shells live in the water’
(2;10)
Ti piacciono le prugne? /
‘Do you like plums?’
(2;10)
K: Chi è che mangia le noci?
‘Who is it that eats nuts?’
M: Lo scoiattolo /
‘Squirrels.’
(2;11)
(23)
(24)
The differentiated use of definite and indefinite referential expressions in these functions
reveals the child’s awareness of the fact that each choice is associated with a different
conceptualization of the denoted entity, more particularly, whether it is perceived as an
individual object (token) or a concept (type). The use of definite expressions with generic
reference as opposed to indefinite expressions to denote any member of a class further
shows that the child encodes the distinction between possible instantiations of a class as
opposed to no instantiations of a class. In all of these functions, the child’s perception of
and knowledge about the referent is identical to that of the interlocutor.
14
4.3.3 Identifying function, anaphoric function, and exophoric function
In all article uses treated in this section, the morphological form of the article is chosen in
accordance with the addressee’s knowledge and perception of the referent.
There were only few situations in Marta’s German which unequivocally called for
the exophoric function. One was given in a German recording at age 2;7. Several
identical cars were scattered on the floor and the Marta said da ein auto ‘there a car’
pointing to one of them, and guck ein autos ‘look a cars’ pointing to another one, while
correctly using the definite article whenever she referred to singletons (e.g. de kuh geht
da ‘the cow goes there’ at 2;6). Such contexts did not occur in the Italian recordings. The
early occurrences in Marta’s German, however, run counter to the observations by
Karmiloff-Smith, according to which the exophoric function is not acquired before age 6.
There is evidence for the use of the indefinite article in the identifying function as
of age 2;4 in Italian and age 2;10 in German. The first context in Italian occurs while
Marta pretends to cook something in a pot, which her interlocutor cannot see. On the
interlocutor’s question cosa prepari? ‘what do you prepare?’ she answers un pollo ‘a
chicken’. Other examples are illustrated below in (25) through (27). The referent in (26)
is a ship which is not present in the context, but whose horn Marta can hear because she
lives close a big river. The examples nicely illustrate the shift to the definite article on
second mentions, i.e. mastery of the anaphoric use. There were fewer occurrences in
German and they are restricted to constructions with avere ‘have’ (e.g. ich hab ein ganz
schöns bett ‘I have a really nice bed’) or presentationals, where naming and identifying
function coincide (e.g. das is ein eis ‘that’s an ice cream’ at 2;11, showing a sausage to
her interlocutor).
(25)
K:
M:
K:
M:
M:
(26)
M:
K:
M:
K:
M:
cos’è? / POINTS TO A TOY PLANE THAT M HAS JUST FOUND
‘what is it?’
un aeroplamo / [=aeroplano]
‘an airplane’
[…] / no che bello della TUI / anch’io voglio un aeroplano / […] /
‘no how nice of the TUI / me too I want an airplane’
tieni qua / GIVES AIRPLANE TO K
‘here you are’
[…]
qua su, l’aeroplamo / [aeroplano] POINTS OUT DIRECTION SHE WANTS THE
PLANE TO TAKE ‘down there, the airplane’
(2;4)
sento una nava / [=nave]
‘I hear a ship’
oh / sì, una nave grandissima /
‘oh’ ‘yes, a very big ship’
[...]
eh è là in fondo / REFERRING TO THE SHIP
‘it’s down there’
là in fondo? /
‘down there?’
sì / la mav- la nave è la in fondo / SPECIFIES REFERENT
15
‘yes’ ‘the ship is down there’
(27)
M:
K:
M:
K:
M:
(2;5)
qua c’è [m] un gatto /
‘there there’s a cat’
un gatto /
‘a cat’
fa miaaaaao /
‘it goes mieooow’
eh sì / ma va / SLIGHTLY IMPRESSED
‘eh yes / wow’
fa così / domme il gatto / [=dorme] MAKES A SLEEPING GESTURE
‘makes.it this / sleeps.it the cat’
(2;5)
There are a number of egocentric errors. Most of them occur in Italian (12 instances);
only one instance is found in German. The interlocutor’s incomprehending reaction
suggests that she was not familiar with the referent indicated by the child. Note however,
that in cases such as (28-29), the referent was commonly perceived by child and
interlocutor, which justifies the use of a definite article, although an adult may have been
more inclined to use an indefinite referring expression.
(28)
K:
M:
K:
(29)
K:
M:
K:
(30)
K:
M:
K:
M:
K:
M:
oh quest’è - /
‘oh this is –’
il tricheco /
‘the walrus’
un tricheco che carino /
‘a walrus how nice’
(2;8)
e quella cos’è? /
‘and that what is it?’
la bambola /
‘the doll’
di chi è questa bambola?
‘whose is it, this doll?’
(2;8)
mi fa male / COMOMPLAINING ABOUT A PAIN IN HER BACK
‘my back hurts’
sì / dopo ti metto la cremina magica /
‘yes / later I’ll put the magic cream on you’
come? / INCOMPREHENDING
‘what?’
(x) la cremina magica / REPEATS
‘the magic cream’
[...]
la camina magica / [=cremina] REPEATS
‘the magic cream’
16
K:
M:
K:
M:
K:
M:
K:
M:
K:
chi è la camina magica? /
‘who is the magic ‘camina’?’
no un’altra /
‘no another’
come? / mi spieghi questa storia? / che significa?
‘what? / can you explain this story to me? / what does it mean?’
la camin- / è l’ a- è l’altra /
‘the magic - / it’s the oth- it’s the other’
l’altra chi? /
‘the other who?’
hm, ti mostro / questa / POINTS TO SOMETHING
‘I’ll show you / this’
mi mostri? /
‘you’ll show me?’
sì / SHOWS THE MAGIC CREAM TO K
‘yes’
[…] hai una cremina magica tu ? / wow così non brucia? /
“you have a magic cream? / wow so that it doesn’t hurt?”
(2;8)
Talking about one and the same referent in several turns becomes more common with
increasing age, while naming objects one by one is a common procedure in the earliest
phases. The increasing use of anaphoric noun phrases goes hand in hand with a change in
the child’s play behavior. At first, it is rather unusual that the child plays with one and the
same object for an extended period. Later, the child begins to act out stories with
particular toys or toy animals, which creates more contexts for anaphoric reference.
Anaphoric reference with definite referring expressions seems to be no problem at any
stage of the child’s development. Reference back to previously introduced referents occur
from age 2;0 in both languages. There are quite a few incoherence errors (four in
German, three in Italian), i.e. cases in which Marta used the indefinite article, although
the referent had been introduced before. For instance, after several references to one
particular cat, she said eine katze geht schnell ‘a cat walks fast’ (2;6), intending the same
cat. However, all instances could also be type references (in the sense of all cats are
walking fast) and are therefore not unequivocally target-deviant. Also, there are
numerous instances in which the definite article is correctly used. One could measure
topic persistence and come up with a high number of correctly used definite referential
expressions. The problem is, however, that all topics are things present in the setting, so
that the function is again ambiguous. More particularly, the use of the definite may
indicate the acquisition of the anaphoric function, but its use may also be due to common
perception or deictic reference. Only in a few cases, such as (26), the latter two factors
can be excluded.
5. The bilingual perspective
The bilingual view on language acquisition raises the question of whether there
are differences in the development of object reference in the two languages, and whether
these are related (i) to more general differences in the child’s linguistic development in
17
the two languages or (ii) whether they are produced by typological differences inherent to
the target-systems. In the following, I will summarize the main contrasts between the
development of Marta’s noun phrases in Italian and German. They can be captured in
both quantitative and qualitative terms.
5.1 Quantitative differences
As regards quantity, Figures 1 and 2 have already demonstrated the lower overall
production of noun phrases in German. As this holds for both bare nouns and determined
nouns, it does not have any major effect on the decrease of the rate of determiner
omission. The use of bare nouns does decrease faster in Italian than in German, the mean
percentage after 2;5, namely 10%, is fairly low compared to monolingual German
children, which may be related to a positive influence of the Romance language, as
argued in Kupisch (in press). That is, the apparent delay in the onset of article and noun
production does not lead to an extended bare noun stage. The share of bare nouns from
the overall number of nouns is 19% in German and 14% in Italian.
A second difference between Marta’s Italian and her German concerns the
frequency of mixed noun phrases, i.e. noun phrases containing elements from both
languages. Cantone (2004) reports a total of 86 in German but only 31 in Italian during
the period before age 4.8 A related observation is the stronger disposition to imitate noun
phrases (bare and determined) in German. These have not been quantified, however.
The third difference is the overall distribution of article types. The share of
definite articles is much higher in Italian than in German (58% as compared to 30%).
This observation may have two explanations. On the one hand, it seems to mirror the
patterns typical of the target-language. Kupisch (2004) reports a higher portion of definite
articles than indefinite articles in adult Italian (76% and 24% respectively), as compared
to German (62% and 38% respectively). In both languages, the definite article
overweighs but the discrepancy between the two article-types is greater in Italian9. We
may assume that children are apt to use more indefinites than adults due to the prevailing
role of the naming function in early child speech. A closer look reveals that the amount of
namings from the total of indefinites is also higher in German (88% as opposed to 75%).
Both points together may be taken to imply that, in German, Marta prevails longer in the
stage for which naming is characteristic, but for typological reasons the language contrast
looks more distinctive than it actually is.
5.2 Qualitative differences
As regards qualitative differences, we can observe that Marta starts to use articles later in
German than in Italian. This should not be interpreted as a delay in the acquisition of
German because monolingual German children are known to produce articles only by the
age of two or even later. Furthermore, as mentioned above, this does not lead to an
extended bare noun stage, but, on the contrary, accelerates the acquisition process, as far
as usage of determiners in obligatory contexts in concerned.
8
The asymmetry may be even more striking if we consider the phase before age 3. Unfortunately, no
numbers are available.
9
Possible explanations are provided in Kupisch and Koops (in prep.).
18
Table 1 indicates the first appearance of each article function in each language.
Noun phrases in the identifying and generic function are observed earlier in Italian; noun
phrases in the exophoric and non-specific uses appear earlier in German. However,
evidence for the non-specific use in German is based on a single instance, and the nonoccurrence of the exophoric function in the Italian data may be due to the absence of
contexts for it in the actual play situations. Given the scarceness of contexts for some
functions, first occurrences should not be overvalued. At least, generalizations should be
drawn from the more diffused functions, such as deictic reference, naming, the specificnonspecific distinction, which appear about the same age in both languages. Accordingly,
there are no major differences between the two languages.
Table 1: Occurrence of article functions
phenomenon
Italian
required
article
deictic reference
naming function
distinction between specific
and non-specific entities
generic reference
exophoric function
identifying function
anaphoric reference
DEF
INDEF
DEF VS.
INDEF/ ZERO
DEF/ INDEF
DEF/ INDEF
INDEF
DEF
first
occurrence
before 2;0
before 2;0
2;3
2;8
2;4
2;0
German
required
article
DEF
INDEF
DEF VS.
INDEF/ ZERO
DEF/ INDEF
DEF/ INDEF
INDEF
DEF
first
occurrence
before 2;0
before 2;0
2;1
2;7
2;10
2;0
5.3 Transfer
Another question concerns the occurrence of negative transfer. As mentioned before,
contrasts between the languages arise in the domain of non-specific reference. Two cases
are theoretically possible: (i) overuse of articles in German contexts which do not require
an article, (ii) article omission in Italian contexts which require one in Italian but not in
German. For obvious reasons, the latter should only be examined from the moment that
article omission has decreased below the 10% level.
There is a total of three cases in German in which mass nouns are treated as if
they were countable. These are cases in which the indefinite article is overused: ein
trinken, lit. ‘a to.drink’ (two occurrences), and en essen, lit.: ‘a to.eat’. In both cases, a
verb has been nominalized to refer to an entity. In the former case, this entity contains
something to drink (a cup); in the latter case, the entity constitutes an edible object.
However, none of the instances would be correct in Italian either, so that transfer could
not explain them. The examples are interesting, though, because they show that the child
has discovered the individualizing function of the indefinite article. Aside from these
cases, mass and abstract nouns are correctly uses without an article in German, e.g. ich
mach musik ‘I make music’ (2;7), un da is kaffee ‘and there’s coffee’, nein mach ich
suppe ‘no make no soup’ (both 2;9).
As for the definite article, it is only overused in two Italian contexts with mass
nouns, e.g. questo non è la frutta ‘this is not the fruit’ (2;11), and questa è la bella musica
‘this is the nice music’ (2;10). Both nouns are uncountable in Italian.
19
There are very few article omissions in obligatory contexts in Italian after the
moment that they have decreased below the 10% level for the first time. They are not
limited to particular functions, but occur with first and second mentions, namings and in
deictic contexts. Of interest here are the cases in non-specific contexts: adesso altro libro
‘now other book’ (2;6 and 2;7), vado a pisciata ‘I go to peepee’ (2;8), anche questo è
pistola ‘this too pistol’ (2;9). Only the second case translates into a bare noun in German.
In brief, article overuse occurs rarely, and it does so in both languages. The few
target-deviant uses are more likely to result from problems in deciding whether particular
lexical items are mass or count than from transfer. Article omission with nouns that
translate into bare nouns in German is not prevailing but almost inexistent. Thus,
negative transfer does not play a role in the development of Marta’s noun phrases.
5.4 Summary
The findings presented in this section indicate that differences between the development
of noun phrases in Marta’s German and her Italian mainly concern quantitative facets, of
which the latter two mirror typological properties of the target-language:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
(v)
the overall number of bare and determined nouns
the amount of mixed and imitated noun phrases
the amount of namings as opposed to other functions
the decrease of the rate of omission
the distribution of article-types
As regards quality, differences arise with respect to the following parameter, which,
again, bears on contrasting properties of the target-languages.
(vi)
the onset of article use
Differences in the order of appearance of single functions appear to be minor, and there
are no apparent cases of negative transfer. Those functions that are typically acquired
later appear with lower frequency in German.
6. Discussion of the results in the light of contemporary syntactic models
In contemporary models in generative syntactic theory, the structure associated
with noun phrases looks as in (31). The idea that noun phrases are DP, which are headed
by the functional head D and take an NP as their complement goes back to Abney (1987).
(31)
DP
1
theD
NP
I
sunN
20
It has recently been suggested that DP is not universally projected. Lyons (1999:323), for
instances, assumes that DP only projects in languages that have definite articles: “The
diachronic emergence of definite articles, then, represents the appearance of the category
of definiteness in languages, and amounts to a change in syntactic structure: the creation
of a DP projection.“
In recent works on noun-phrase structure we find elaborate proposals on the
structure of noun phrases that go beyond the representation of functional features, such as
gender, number, and case, in syntax. In Lyon’s book Definiteness, arguments are
presented in favor of the view that not all articles are Ds: “While definite articles, along
with other definite determiners, are associated syntactically with some Det position [...],
my proposal is that cardinal, or quasi-indefinite, articles have their locus, along with
numerals, in some more interior cardinality position in the noun phrase.” (Lyons
1999:105/106). Other researchers have specified the semantic function that should be
associated with the head D itself, namely specificity / referentiality (e.g. De Villiers &
Roeper 1995, Pérez-Leroux & Roeper 1999, Schaeffer & De Villiers 2000). In Chomsky
(2000:139), we find the following quote: “In MP it is speculated that categories lacking
interpretable features should be diallowed [...]. The argument carries over to other cases,
among them semantically null determiners Dnull. If true D relates to referentiality/
specificity in some sense, then an indefinite nonspecific nominal phrase (a lot of people,
someone that enters into scopal interactions, etc.) must be a pure NP, not a DP with a
Dnull [...].
So far, however, few works in the generative framework have tried to capture the
acquisition of semantic and pragmatic features in contemporary syntactic models. The
exceptions are Schaeffer 1999, Schaffer and De Villiers 2000, and Matthewson et al.
2001. In all works, D is associated with specific reference, but in Schaffer & De Villiers’s
proposal only specific definites are linked to DP, while specific indefinites (e.g. I saw a
gray cat) are linked to NumP, a projection below DP. They argue that the two uses
should be represented by different syntactic nodes because they are not acquired
simultaneously. Matthewson et al. propose a range of semantic/ pragmatic distinctions
that they presume to be grammaticalized in syntax. It is hypothesized that children look
progressively for distinctions that expand the syntactic tree towards more specificity,
where familiarity/ uniqueness is the most specific option. The most elaborate proposal, so
far, has been advanced by Roeper (in press.). He proposes a fine-grained structure for
noun phrases with NP and DP as principal nodes and a variety of intervening nodes
between them, each with a particular reading. Given syntactic projections are conceived
of as a bundle of features that in turn may represent distinct semantic formula, he
assumes that “we might expect that each one would project a distinct syntactic node.”
(Roeper, in press:9). As in Matthewson et al., the child is assumed to move from less
specific to more specific projections (and specificity-related projections are higher up in
the tree), which reflects the intuitive idea that specificity adds information.
The following representation shows an adaptation of Roeper’s proposal.10 A
linguistic example was added after each node, indicating the age of at the first occurrence
of this function in Marta’s Italian. Roeper did not include a node for the naming function,
but following Roeper’s logic, naming should be somewhere lower in the tree, and
consequently acquired early, which is consistent with the acquisition data.
10
For the sake of simplicity some of the nodes were omitted.
21
(32)
DP
1
D  PROPER NAME 1;11: a mamma ‘the mummy’; borsa n tanja ‘bag tanja’
1
D  DEMONSTRATIVE DEICTIC 1;7: il cane ‘the dog’
1
D  DEFINITE UNIQUE 1;10: na nuna [=la luna]; 2;0: il sole
1
‘the moon’, ‘the
sun’
D  PART-WHOLE 2;1: il naso ‘the nose’
1
D  DEFINITE EXPLETIVE 2;4: fare la musica
1
‘make
music’
D  INDEFINITE SPECIFIC 2;4: che prepari? – un pollo
1
‘what do you prepare? – a
chicken’
NP  DEF. SPECIFIC 2;3: non è una chiocciola
1
‘it’s not
a
snail’
NP  GENERIC 2;8: solo i cervi
1 context: only deer has horns
N  DEFAULT KIND 1;8: cane ‘dog’
(adapted from Roeper (in press.): 9-10)
The order of appearance of the single semantic distinctions in the corpus is totally
inconsistent with the idea that the semantic tree is extended from less specific to more
specific functions. This remains a fact, even if we eliminate the low frequency functions
for the reasons mentioned in 5.2. The evaluation of the model based on the data and vice
versa raises some interesting questions.
First, the functions do not appear progressively in a bottom-up fashion. This poses
the question of whether syntactic nodes should be acquired in a bottom-up fashion at all
or whether the child establishes the principal syntactic nodes NP and DP first and
subsequently acquires the more fine-grained distinctions, such as that between generic
and non-specific reference. A related issue is whether each single semantic distinction
should represent a separate node or rather one of several features associated with a node.
Second, the findings reported in 4.3.1 cast doubts on the assumption that all bare nouns
constitute kind references, although this could possibly be argued for namings.
Apparently, children can make reference to specific entities without resorting to syntactic
operations, such as the merger of article and noun. This brings up the question of whether
children’s early noun phrases are syntactic entities at all, or merely lexical items with
referential features different from those of adults. These puzzles cannot be further
explored here but the findings may initiate further elaboration of syntactic models built
on the assumption that semantic properties are represented in syntax.
22
7. Conclusions
The present study has shown that children the acquisition of noun phrases does
not only involve a growing number of determiners in obligatory context, but also a
growing number of functions that are associated with one particular article form. In the
initial stage, children’s way of referring to object differs from that of adults. While adults
mainly use determined noun phrase to refer to specific entities, children make specific
reference by using adverbs (sometimes homophonous with articles), bare nouns or
determined nouns. That is, the child’s acquisition path departs from a highly contextdependent use of referential means, then, slowly progresses towards a more morphosyntactically determined way of referring. The acquisition path resembles diachronic
processes in that determination starts in the domain of specific reference (see Blazer
1979, Givón 1981, Selig 1992, Stark (in press), for the historical perspective). The
functional analysis shows that even in acquisition stages in which article by children is
not adult-like, it is not “erroneous”. Rather, particular functions are expressed differently
that is less explicit morpho-syntactically. Although the present treatment has suggested
that reference in children and adults is performed in distinct ways, the present study is in
accordance with recent studies showing that children comply with adult requirements in
the domain of the syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics interface earlier than has been
previously assumed (e.g. De Cat 2004). This is because the analysis was based on very
early data stage including the age before two years, and it was shown that soon after the
second year, children make extensive use of articles to express semantic and pragmatic
relations, similar to adults. The functional perspective also pinpoints the limits associated
with input studies. The observation that frequent elements in the input are acquired early
is true to some extent (see Kupisch 2004), but it does not say anything about the dynamic
process in which one particular form takes on a variety of functions over time.
The bilingual case sheds some more light on a functional analysis because if
certain functions appear only in one of the two languages, this may be taken to mean that
article used is determined by other factors besides cognitive mastery. One possibility is a
general delay in the development of one language; i.e. language imbalance. Another is
that certain typological characteristics of a language slow down the acquisition process.
This seems to be the case for German monolingual children. In the present case, the
simultaneous exposure to Italian seems to have a positive effect on the acquisition of
German. Although there is a quantitative difference due to a slight imbalance towards
German as the language developing more slowly, there appear to be no major qualitative
differences.
The data has been interpreted in the light of contemporary syntactic theories that
presuppose semantically driven nodes. The data is largely inconsistent with the
assumption that syntactic trees are extended from less specific towards more specific
semantic features, and, provided that semantics is reflected in syntax, it provides a
challenge to theories in the tradition of strong continuity. The continuity assumption may
be saved by formulating additional assumptions, such as empty positions that are
equipped with certain features. For instance, bare nouns may have specific reference
because they are moved into an empty position that provides them with a specificity
23
feature. But so far, this solution remains speculative. And it is hard to see how it can be
falsified with data from the one-word stage.
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