The acquisition of Hindi split-ergativity and differential object marking by Dutch L1 speakers: systematicity and variation

ABSTRACT

We investigated the acquisition of Hindi split ergativity (zero or -ne marking) and Hindi differential object marking (DOM; zero or -ko marking) by L1 speakers of Dutch. Both grammatical phenomena are conditioned by multiple syntactic and semantic features. On a descriptive level, the study aims to examine when and how Dutch-speaking learners acquire and apply the conditional features associated with -ne and -ko marking in Hindi as a foreign language (HFL). A specific learner corpus was created based on a picture description task that elicited semi-spontaneous oral production data from 15 Dutch-speaking learners of Hindi, from four cross-sectional stages of the Hindi course trajectory. We annotated the corpus data for multiple features associated with -ne and -ko marking. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, we found an increase in the use and accuracy of each case marker over the different years of study, but individual learner profile analyses revealed considerable intersubject differences in learner behavior. We argue that the developmental stages for the emergence of -ne and -ko marking are in line with predictions based on Processability Theory. We additionally include mastery level analysis to account for a combined perspective on language development. Our findings reveal that HFL learners reach higher mastery levels for split ergativity than for DOM, even though DOM (-ko marking) emerges before split ergativity (-ne marking). We conclude that developmental stages and between-learner variation are not mutually exclusive.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study and the replication code in R are available through TROLLing: Ponnet, Aaricia; De Cuypere, Ludovic, 2023, “Replication Data for: The acquisition of Hindi split-ergativity and Differential Object Marking by Dutch L1 speakers: systematicity and variation,” https://doi.org/10.18710/3YWQ8R; DataverseNO, V1.

Notes

¹ The South Asian languages Hindi and Urdu are closely related. As the students participating in this study were enrolled in a Hindi language course, at an institute where Urdu was not offered as a subject of study, we will mainly refer to Hindi in this article (as opposed to the term Hindi/Urdu that is used by many scholars).

² We do not use the term “absolutive” because Hindi does not conform to the ergative absolutive pattern (Butt & King 2004): in a split ergative language like Hindi both “nominative” and “absolutive” can designate the same form-function unit, the S-argument, and this leads to unnecessary confusion.

³ Note that we will be using a consistent set of glosses even if examples are sourced from elsewhere. Our glosses may thus differ from the original source.

⁴ Montrul et al. (2019), for example, consider -ko marking to be obligatory when the DO is a personal pronoun, and optional when the DO is non-human and, in certain instances, human and non-specific.

⁵ One of the limitations of this study is that it investigates so-called “Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic” (WEIRD) subjects (Henrich et al. 2010, Andringa & Godfroid 2020).

⁶ Apart from learner 1m (year 1) who mentioned to have had some exposure to Nepali before enrolling in her Hindi course.

⁷ See Ponnet & De Cuypere (2023) for more details about the materials.

⁸ The number 84 refers to the utterance ID in the corpus data. The dataset is shared in TROLLing (see Data Availability Statement).

⁹ Apart from learner 1o, who did not produce any non-specific human animate DOs at all.

¹⁰ Learner 1y is not the only learner to do so, but he is the first learner who marks all three of the DO types that were realized with the numeral ek.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO)-Vlaanderen under Grant number 11G8321N.