Splitting the notion of 'agent': Case-marking in early child Hindi

Narasimhan, Bhuvana

doi:10.1017/S0305000905007117

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Splitting the notion of 'agent': Case-marking in early child Hindi

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Narasimhan, Bhuvana
Language Acquisition Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Event Representation, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Narasimhan, B. (2005). Splitting the notion of 'agent': Case-marking in early child Hindi. Journal of Child Language, 32(4), 787-803. doi:10.1017/S0305000905007117.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0013-1E67-3

Abstract

Two construals of agency are evaluated as possible innate biases guiding case-marking in children. A BROAD construal treats agentive arguments of multi-participant and single-participant events as being similar. A NARROWER construal is restricted to agents of multi-participant events. In Hindi, ergative case-marking is associated with agentive participants of multi-participant, perfective actions. Children relying on a broad or narrow construal of agent are predicted to overextend ergative case-marking to agentive participants of transitive imperfective actions and/or intransitive actions. Longitudinal data from three children acquiring Hindi (1;7 to 3;9) reveal no overextension errors, suggesting early sensitivity to distributional patterns in the input.