| This dissertation is about children's acquisition of the polysemous preposition with. Among other things, with marks instruments (Kim ate a muffin with a fork), accompaniments (Kim ate a muffin with a friend, Kim ate a muffin with her coffee), manners (Kim ate a muffin with reluctance), and attributes (Kim ate a muffin with poppy seeds). How do children deal with the polysemy of with? Evidence from a corpus analysis and three experimental studies shows that children deal with the multiple meanings of with by initially assigning it a meaning more general than the meanings illustrated above. In particular, I argue against an 'instrumental' with in the language of 3- and 4-year-olds: the notion of using something to accomplish some goal is not the first meaning mapped onto with. Using data from the CHILDES archive, I analysed six children's earliest uses of with and compared them to uses of with in child-directed speech, as well as to their earliest uses of for. In comprehension, I followed up on Duchan & Lund's (1979) finding that children sometimes give theme answers to What do you VERB with? questions (e.g., Food in answer to What do you eat with?). I found that even with the help of photographs, a significant proportion of three-and-a-half- to four-and-a-half-year-olds sometimes gave theme answers to VERB + with questions. In production, I analysed the ways children and adults expressed instruments in elicited descriptions. While adults produced with and use to indicate instruments, children relied on several methods in addition to with, including take, put, get, and pick up. Finally, in truth-value judgements, 3-year-olds judged statements of the form X is VERBING Y with Z as true for depicted situations where Z is present near X but not used by X. These results provide evidence that children start out with a more general meaning for with than instrument, accompaniment, manner, and attribute. I suggest that this meaning is HAVING, a possessive relation that is the inverse of the genitive in that the possessum rather than the possessor is marked. |
