Format:
xvii, 201 Seiten
,
Illustrationen, Diagramme
Content:
A critical task in daily communications is identifying who did what to whom in an utterance, or assigning the thematic roles agent and patient in a sentence. This dissertation is concerned with Tagalog-speaking children’s use of word order and morphosyntactic markers for thematic role assignment. It aims to explain children’s difficulties in interpreting sentences with a non-canonical order of arguments (i.e., patient-before-agent) by testing the predictions of the following accounts: the frequency account (Demuth, 1989), the Competition model (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), and the incremental processing account (Trueswell & Gleitman, 2004). Moreover, the experiments in this dissertation test the influence of a word order strategy in a language like Tagalog, where the thematic roles are always unambiguous in a sentence, due to its verb-initial order and its voice-marking system. In Tagalog’s voice-marking system, the inflection on the verb indicates the thematic role of the noun marked by 'ang.' First, the possible basis for a word…
Note:
Dissertation Universität Potsdam 2018
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Online-Ausgabe García, Rowena Thematic role assignment and word order preferences in the child language acquisition of Tagalog Potsdam, 2018
Language:
English
Keywords:
Hochschulschrift
Author information:
Höhle, Barbara 1957-
