Abstract
This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the major studies and generative theories on the acquisition of the passive, long thought to be delayed in child language. The chapter begins with a discussion of the potential problems faced by the child in the acquisition of the passive, including frequency, syntactic synonyms, thematic role reversal, etc. Section 2 presents the seminal experimental studies which establish the backbone of our understanding of this delay in the passive. The various theoretical treatments of this delay are discussed in Sect. 3, along with the relevant evidence for and against these theories. The chapter closes with a review of more recent developments which include the use of novel methodologies and advancements on old methodologies, all of which indicate that the delay in the acquisition of the passive may be less severe and/or of a different nature than previously thought.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Perhaps most problematic, subsequent to Borer & Wexler’s proposal, the notion of the VP-internal subject (Koopman & Sportiche, 1991) was largely adopted by the field. This is problematic because movement of the subject from a VP-internal position to the subject position is clearly A-movement, and is therefore predicted to be problematic for children under the ACDH. However, the Universal Phase Hypothesis, discussed below, which updates the ACDH, does not suffer from this problem, and so this is not discussed further.
- 2.
There is ample evidence for this analysis, e.g., in English, unaccusatives may occur with expletive subjects, but unergatives may not (compare ‘there arrived three men’, and ‘there talked three men’). This is because the argument in the unaccusative originates in object position, and if it stays in that position, an expletive is inserted to fill the subject position. This is not possible with unergatives, since the sole argument is already in subject position. Furthermore, verbs that take an underlying object (unaccusatives) behave like passives when it comes to the possibility of a resultative clause. For example, the passive sentence ‘The floor has been swept clean’ is a passive with a resultative ‘clean’. Unaccusatives behave like passives in allowing resultatives, e.g., ‘The river froze solid’, while unergatives do not allow resultatives: ‘Dora shouted hoarse’ (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995; see also Burzio 1986). The similarity with passive in this respect suggests that both constructions are underlyingly similar, i.e., both involve an underlying object.
- 3.
Babyonyshev et al. show that in Russian a negative element (such as no one, or nothing) must be licensed by clausal negation. This licensing occurs when the negative element is m-commanded by negation. Important to our point, a negative argument of an unaccusative is licensed NOT when negation m-commands the object position, but only when negation m-commands the subject position. This shows that at some point in the derivation (presumably at LF), the object argument is associated with the subject position, and hence the claim that the unaccusative argument undergoes covert movement to subject position.
- 4.
The fact that the rate of supply of genitive case in the regular and the bleached unaccusative conditions are so similar is not addressed by Babyonyshev et al. except to point out that the bleached verbs occur with GoN 100% of the time in the input, and so a rate of genitive supply of 47% for the bleached unaccusatives is remarkably low.
- 5.
It should be noted that frequency is not the only factor that differentiates Sesotho from English. Passive morphology in Sesotho is a suffix on the verb, and is far less variable than in English (as described in the introduction). For examples, adjectival passives are not synonymous with verbal passives. Furthermore, middles are not marked with the passive morphology, and are therefore very distinct from passives. Thus frequency alone may not be what differentiates the time course of the acquisition of passive in Sesotho from English.
- 6.
Similar results have been obtained using a more intensive protocol, where children are trained on one kind of passive and are then able to generalize on the basis of that training (see, for example, de Villiers (1980); Brooks and Tomasello (1999)). Here, just a single prime is provided (no training), and is therefore a measure of the child’s knowledge state.
- 7.
References
Allen, S.E.M., and M.B. Crago. 1996. Early passive acquisition in Inuktitut. Journal of Child Language 23(1): 129–155.
Babyonyshev, M., J. Ganger, D. Pesetsky, and K. Wexler. 2001. The maturation of grammatical principles: Evidence from Russian unaccusatives. Linguistic Inquiry 32(1): 1–44.
Baldie, B.J. 1976. The acquisition of the passive voice. Journal of Child Language 3: 331–349.
Becker, M. 2006. There began to be a learnability puzzle. Linguistic Inquiry 37(3): 441–456.
Bencini, G.M.L., and V. Valian. 2008. Abstract sentence representation in 3-year-olds: Evidence from comprehension and production. Journal of Memory and Language 59: 97–113.
Bever, T.G., M. Garrett, and R. Hurtig. 1973. The interaction of perceptual processes and ambiguous sentences. Memory and Cognition 1: 277–286.
Bock, J.K. 1986. Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18: 355–387.
Borer, H., and K. Wexler. 1987. The maturation of syntax. In Parameter setting, ed. T. Roeper and E. Williams, 123–172. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Borer, H., and K. Wexler. 1992. Bi-unique relations and the maturation of grammatical principles. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 10: 147–189.
Brooks, P., and M. Tomasello. 1999. How young children constrain their argument structure constructions. Language 75: 720–738.
Brown, R. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Burzio, L. 1986. Italian syntax. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Celce-Murcia, M. and D. Larsen-Freeman. 1999. The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher’s course. Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle Publishing Company.
Choe, J.S. 2011. What seems to be real may be Illusory: Acquisition of raising with an experiencer. In Proceedings to the 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. N. Danis, K. Mesh, and H. Sung, 110–118. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Chomsky, N. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Crain, S., and C. McKee. 1985. Acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora. In Proceedings of the North Eastern Linguistic Society, vol. 16, 94–110. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Crain, S., R. Thornton, and K. Murasugi. 2009. Capturing the evasive passive. Language Acquisition 16(2): 123–133.
Crawford, J. 2005. An adversity passive analysis of early Sesotho passives: Reanalyzing a counterexample to maturation. In Online Supplement to the Proceedings of the 29th Boston University Conference on Language Development, eds. A. Brugos, M.R. Clark-Cotton and S. Ha. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
de Villiers, J. 1980. The process of rule-learning in child speech- a new look. In Child language, vol. 2, ed. K. Nelson. New York: Gardner Press.
de Villiers, J., and P. de Villiers. 1973. Development of the use of word order in comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2: 331–341.
Demuth, K. 1989. Maturation and the acquisition of Sesotho passive. Language 65: 56–80.
Demuth, K., F. Moloi, and M. Machobane. 2010. Three-year-olds’ comprehension, production, and generalization of Sesotho passives. Cognition, 115, 238–251.
Fox, D., and Y. Grodzinsky. 1998. Children’s passive: A view from the by-phrase. Linguistic Inquiry 29: 311–332.
Fraser, C., U. Bellugi, and R. Brown. 1963. Control of grammar in imitation, comprehension, and production. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 2: 121–135.
Gordon, P., and J. Chafetz. 1990. Verb-based versus class-based accounts of actionality effects in children’s comprehension of passives. Cognition 36: 227–254.
Hirsch, C., R. Orfitelli, and K. Wexler. 2008. The acquisition of raising reconsidered. Paper presented at the Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, Barcelona.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., and R. Golinkoff. 1999. How babies talk: The magic and mystery of language acquisition. New York: Dutton/Penguin.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., R. Golinkoff, and L. Gordon. 1984. Word order comprehension in a new paradigm: Did Big Bird Tickle Cookie Monster? Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development. New York: Dutton/Penguin.
Horgan, D. 1978. The development of the full passive. Journal of Child Language 5: 65–80.
Ko, I. 2005. Nominative case-marker omission and A-chain deficit in child language acquisition of Korean. In University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics, ed. A. Schutz, vol. 36(9), Honolulu: UHWPL.
Koopman, H., and D. Sportiche. 1991. The position of subjects. Lingua, 85.1, 211–258.
Lau, E., and K. Deen. in review. Early acquisition of the passive in Cantonese. Manuscript in review.
Lee, H., and K. Wexler. 2001. Nominative case omission and unaccusatives in Korean acquisition. Selected papers from the International Conference of Korean Linguistics, 12: 263–79.
Lee, T., and C. Wong. 1998. CANCORP: the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 27(2): 211–228.
Levin, B., and M. Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface, Linguistic inquiry monograph, vol. 26. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Machida, N., S. Miyagawa, and K. Wexler. 2004. A-chain maturation re-examined: Why Japanese children perform better on full unaccusatives than on passives, ms. In MIT Working Papers in Linguistics: Plato’s problem. Papers in language acquisition, 48, eds. Csiramz, Aniko, A. Gualmini and A. Nevins, 91–112. Cambridge, MA.
MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Maratsos, M.P., D. Fox, J. Becker, and M.A. Chalkley. 1985. Semantic restrictions on children’s passives. Cognition 19: 167–191.
O’Brien, K., E. Grolla, and D. Lillo-Martin. 2006. Long passives are understood by young children. In Proceedings from the 30th Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, and C. Saller, 441–451. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Okabe, R., and T. Sano. 2002. The acquisition of implicit arguments in Japanese and related Âmatters. In Proceedings to the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, eds. Skarabela, Barbora, S. Fish, and Anna H.-J. Do, 485–499. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Pearson, B., and T. Roeper. 2004. Learnability and triggers: Obligatory versus optional triggers for the passive in two dialects of English and in language impairment. In The Proceedings of the 28th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, eds. A. Brugos, L. Micciulla, and C. Smith, 447–460. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Perlmutter, D., and P. Postal. 1984. The 1-advancement exclusiveness hypothesis. In Studies in relational grammar, 2nd ed, ed. D. Perlmutter and C. Rosen, 81–126. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pesetsky, D. 1982. Paths and categories. Unpublished Doctoral dissertation. MIT: Cambridge, MA.
Pullum, G. 2009. 50 Years of stupid grammar advice. The Chronicle Review, 55(32): B15.
Pye, C., and P. Quixtan Poz. 1988. Precocious passives (and Antipassives) in Quiché Mayan. Papers and reports on child language development, Stanford, 27.71–80.
Rayner, K., and C.J. Posnansky. 1978. Stages of processing in word identification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 107: 64–80.
Roeper, T., S. Lapointe, J. Bing, and S. Tavakolian. 1981. In Language acquisition and linguistic theory, ed. S. Tavakolian, 35–58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sano, T. 2000. Issues on unaccusatives and passives in the acquisition of Japanese. In Proceedings of the Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, vol. 1, 1–21. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo.
Sudhalter, V., and M. Braine. 1985. How does comprehension of passives develop? A comparison of actional and experiential verbs. Journal of Child Language 12: 455–470.
Sugisaki, K. 1999. Developmental issues in the acquisition of Japanese unaccusatives and passives. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. A. Greenhill, H. Littlefield, and C. Tano, 668–683. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Suzman, S. 1987. Passives and prototypes in Zulu children’s speech. African Studies 46: 241–254.
Turner, E., and R. Rommetveit. 1967. Experimental manipulation of the production of active and passive voice in children. Language and Speech 10: 169–180.
Wasow, T. 1977. Transformations and the Lexicon. In Formal Syntax., eds. Peter W. Culicover, T. Wasow, and A. Akmajian. New York: Academic Press.
Wexler, K. 2004. Theory of phasal development: Perfection in child grammar. In MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 48: Plato’s Problems: Papers on Language Acquisition, eds. A. Csirmaz, A. Gualmini, and A. Nevins, 159–209. Cambridge, MA.
Xu, T. 2010. Are chinese children’s passives delayed? In Proceedings to the Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, ed. Y. Otsu, 269–289. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
Xu, T., and X. Yang. 2008. Children’s acquisition of passives in Chinese. In The Proceedings of the Ninth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, ed. Y. Otsu. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Deen, K.U. (2011). The Acquisition of the Passive. In: de Villiers, J., Roeper, T. (eds) Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1688-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1688-9_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1687-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1688-9
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)