Possessive Constructions in Child German: Corpus Data

and Elicitation Games

Sonja Eisenbeiss (University of Essex)

Ingrid Sonnenstuhl (Duesseldorfer Akademie)

seisen@essex.ac.uk

Types of PossessionAdnominal Possessive Constructions (APCs)Both Possessor (PR) and Possessum (PM) are

encoded within the same noun phrase (e.g. my/daddy’s chickens, the chickens of our neighbours, …);

Predicative The possessive relationship is encoded by a two-

place predicate such as have, own or belong or by be (e.g. I have a dog. The dog belongs to me. This dog is mine);

“External”The PR and the PM are realised as arguments of a

verb whose lexical meaning does not involve

Research Questions• Is the full range of children’s forms and

constructions available early on and generalised rapidly (Full Competence)? Or do children extend the range and use of forms and constructions incrementally (Lexical learning or Usage Based Approaches)?

• Do children acquire more prototypical uses of constructions earlier than less prototypical ones?

• In which ways do children deviate from the target?

• Do children exhibit the constraints of the target language early on?

• Can child data provide evidence about the nature of constraints

German APCs

• pronouns

• prepositional constructions

• possessive pronouns

• ‘s possessives

• von ‘of’ PPs

• genitive constructions (not attested in early child language)

• dative possessors (regional variant not investigated here)

Pronouns

Possessive Pronoun(1) sein Freund

his friend‘his friend’

Prepositional Construction with Personal Pronoun(2) ein Freund von ihm

a friend of his‘a friend of his’

Preferred when PR has been introduced or when PR is 1st/2ndPs.

-s

(3) PaulsFreundPaul’s friend‘Paul’s friend’

Restricted to unmodified proper names and unmodified kinship terms that can be used like names (e.g. Mamas ‘mommy‘s‘)

=> Syntactic or semantic restriction??? Can child data help us to distinguish between these options?

von ‘of’

(4) ein Freund von Paul/seinemVater

a friend of Paul/his father‘a friend of Paul’s’ / ‘a friend of his father’

(5) ? Dasist bestimmt VON PAUL derFreund

that is surely OF PAUL thefriend

‘That is surely Paul’s friend’(6) ? Von wem hast du den Vater

gesehen?of whom have you the fatherseen?‘Whose father have you seen?’

Preferred order PM < PR, but variation and extractions sometimes possible

Data

Ann And Car Han Leo Mat Sve

I 2;4-2;5 2;0-2;1 1;11-2;0 2;3-2;9

II 2;6 2;2-2;3 2;1-2;2 2;10

III 2;7 2;1 2;4 2;3-2;5 2;11-3;0

IV 2;8-2;9 3;3-3;6 2;6-2;8 2;6-2;11 3;1-3;6 2;9-3;3

65 recordings from 7 monolingual German children

from the Clahsen and LEXLERN corpora (Clahsen 1982, Clahsen/Vainikka/Young-Scholten

1990)

0

20

40

60

80

100

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

overt D-element (quantifier, article,..) in %overt D-element in formulaic utterances (in % )D+N combinations (number of types)

D-Elements in obligatory contexts: Hannah

I: unpoductive use in formulaic utterances

and fixed D+N-combinations

II: reanalysis

III: development

IV: productive use in obligatory contexts

=> no adult-like representations in early stages

Stages

Types of APCs (Stage I-IV)

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

I II III IV

possessive pronoun 's possessive von-PP

Variation

• Hannah does not produce any APCs in I/II, but only precursors, such as single-word utterances that consist of the Possessor’s name or a possessive pronoun.

• Leonie does not use possessive pronouns in I

• Only Carsten, Hannah and Svenja produce von-PPs.

no variation in order, but some children have an even more limited range of constructions in early stages.

availability of lexical items (e.g. possessive pronouns) does not automatically lead to their use in an APC

Animacy in APCs (Stage I-IV)

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

I II III IV

self human animate inanimate

Types of Possessive Relations in APCs

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

I II III IV

ownership kinship body part part of object

Distinguishing Possessive Relations

III and IV: 10 utterances where a legal or habitual ownership relation is encoded noun-phrase internally and a temporary ownership or physical control relation is encoded at the sentential level.

Mathias 3;4: der hat deine uhr

‘this-one has your clock’

Andreas 2;1: da Annette hat mei(nen) wasserball da

there Annette has my waterball there

=> children start to distinguish between different types of possessive relations.

Incremental Development• no adnominal possessive constructions in

early stages for some children• proper name possessives ≤ possessive

pronouns < prepositional constructions• increase in proportion of pronominal

possessors• animate possessor < inanimate possessor• ownership< kinship < body part < part of

object• evidence for distinction and combination of

possessive relations only in later stages incremental extension of the range of

constructions and possessive relations earlier emergence of prototypical possessive

relations

Constraints: The Development of -s

I: no –s in obligatory contextsII/III: initial restrictions of –s to high-frequency

itemsLeonie: is mamis

is mommy‘sSonja: Und welches ist Sonjas Auto?

and which one is Sonja’s car? Leonie: sonja autos

Sonja carsIV: a few overgeneralisation to common nouns

(semantic violation), but not to modified nouns (syntactic violation)

Examples of Violations for –s:

Leonie 2;4: affes banane

monkey’s banana ‘the monkey’s banana’

Leonie 2;7: clowns hut ()

clown’s hat ‘the clown’s hat’

Svenja 3;2: das is junges gürtel

this is boy’s belt ‘this is the boy’s belt’#

Semi-Structured Elicitation

• Encouraging speech production in a naturalistic (often game-like) setting.

• e.g. eliciting complete sentences with the verb to give in an "animal feeding game": participants have to feed toy animals and explain which food items they would like to give to which animals (Eisenbeiss 1994)

• often used as supplements to naturalistic data or experiments

The Puzzle Task (Eisenbeiss 2009)

• a task with co-players: child describes contrasting pictures on a puzzle board, adult finds the matching pieces, child puts them into the correct cut-out

• exchangable pictures and puzzle pieces

• can be used to elictit particular forms or to elicit the linguistic encoding of particular meanings

Elicitation: Possessive Constructions

• 10 monolingual German children (3-6 years)

• pictures: actions on body parts of animals (washing, biting, object placement…)

• primary target: External Possession constructionsThe giraffe is biting the rabbit on the ear

• secondary target: PP-APCs der mund von der katze ‘the mouth of the cat’

Elicitation Material: bite

Elicitation Material: wash

Elicitation Material: put on

Elicitation: Initial Observations

• All children used PP-APCs der mund von der katze ‘the mouth of the cat’

• Two children also produced:

• –s-overgeneralisations (katzes kopf ‘cat’s head’),

• compound nouns (katzenbauch ‘cat tummy’), which are grammatical but dispreferred.

• Four further children produced compounds, but no –s-overgeneralisations.

• None of the –s-Possessors was modified though all children used modifiers with these nouns in other contexts (von der Katze ‘of the cat’).

Work in Progress• genitive APCs in older children• dative APCs in other variants of German• micro-development• more studies on constraints on -s • child L2: are stages and acquisition orders due to

cognitive development, neural maturation, frequency?

• input: what determines which nouns are used with –s• the frequency of –s inflected forms? • the frequency or distribution of contrasts

between• inflected and uninflected forms (Leonie vs.

Leonie‘s• contrasts between modified nouns and

unmodified nouns in possession constructions and other contexts