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Asymmetries in children's production of relative clauses: data from English and Korean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2015

CHAE-EUN KIM  and
WILLIAM O'GRADY
CHAE-EUN KIM
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Literature, Korea University
WILLIAM O'GRADY*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaiiat Manoa
*
Address for correspondence: William O'Grady, Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaiiat Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA96822. e-mail: ogrady@hawaii.edu
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Abstract

We report here on a series of elicited production experiments that investigate the production of indirect object and oblique relative clauses by monolingual child learners of English and Korean. Taken together, the results from the two languages point toward a pair of robust asymmetries: children manifest a preference for subject relative clauses over indirect object relative clauses, and for direct object relative clauses over oblique relative clauses. We consider various possible explanations for these preferences, of which the most promising seems to involve the requirement that the referent of the head noun be easily construed as what the relative clause is about.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 5 , September 2016 , pp. 1038 - 1071
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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