| Utilizing longitudinal data from the "Irene" corpus of the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), this study investigates the acquisition of argument structure and verb phrase from the earliest stages of language production of one monolingual child learning Peninsular Spanish. Specific attention is paid to three areas of emergence: (1) argument-specific verb types, such as unaccusatives, unergatives, and transitives; (2) various morphological forms of the verb produced by the child, particularly tensed and non-tensed forms such as imperatives and infinitive expressions; and (3) the position of overt arguments.; The data of this study suggest the acquisition of arguments in the order of Theme, Agent, and Experiencer. Earliest verb types produced were Theme-oriented. These were followed by Agent-only structures with no overt arguments. Also important is the early correlation found between morphological form and degree of agentivity of the verb, where verbs with Agent subjects exclusively appeared in the imperative and Theme-oriented verbs appeared primarily as tensed forms. Only one Experiencer verb, ver 'to see,' appeared in the data and only in infinitival hortative form throughout the period studied. Net until the very end of the period did other Experiencer verbs appear, and in tensed form. When overt arguments did start to appear they did so postverbally.; This study confirms Ojea's (1997) findings that Irene's acquisition data support a weak version of the Continuity Hypothesis, proposing underspecification at the level of the little v of the vP shell. In other words, the child perceives agentivity in adult speech to occupy a node higher in the tree than does Theme, but possessing only big VP initially, and no little v level, she has no choice but to aim higher in the tree to express agentivity, leading her to move the verb from T into the C position, making it by default imperative in form, hence the Agentivity Constraint (AC). This study also proposes two separate developmental trajectories for the child, one for Theme verbs which very much resembles adult syntax, and another for Agent verbs which is a syntactic innovation drawing upon Merge and existing binary structure. |
