Locatum Structures and the Acquisition of Telicity

Abstract

This article presents a study of a between-subjects design experiment on the comprehension of telicity in simple telic predicates (e.g., John filled the bucket) and locatum predicates (e.g., the water filled the bucket) in L1 Spanish. Weist, Wysocka, and Lyytinen (1991) for English and Finnish, and Van Hout (1997, 1998b) for English and Dutch have shown that children up to age 6;06 allow simple telic predicates to have both telic and atelic interpretations. The main objective of this article is to show that children aged 3;09 allow locatum structures to be interpreted as telic, like adults, but allow simple telic predicates to have telic and atelic interpretations. The central claim is that in simple telic predicates, telicity is checked by covert movement, while in locatum predicates, telicity is checked by overt movement. Children misinterpret simple telic predicates because covert movement is an operation that takes place after the branching off to the PF component, but perform like adults when overt movement is involved.

Notes

¹Some portions of this article have been published in the Proceedings of GALA 2007 [Hodgson, Miren. 2008. Locatum sentences, overt movement and compositional telicity. In Anna Gavarró and M. João Freitas (eds.), Language Acquisition and Development: Proceedings of GALA 2007, 264–269. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing] and in Selected Proceedings of the 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium [Hodgson, Miren. 2009. The role of object movement in the acquisition of telicity. In Joseph Collentine et al. (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 93–104. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project] and are reprinted here with permission of the author.

²Time span adverbials such as in X time and for X time are standard tests used to determine whether a predicate is telic or atelic. Telic predicates can be used with in X time adverbs, but not with for X time. By contrast, atelic predicates can be used with for X time adverbs, but not with in X time.

³According to Chomsky (1995), the intuitive idea behind LF movement operations (covert movement) is that they are “wired-in” within the computational system, operating mechanically; therefore they are less costly than overt operations.

⁴In addition to the type of verb and the type of object, another lexical element that contributes to telicity is the reflexive clitic se (Strozer 1976; Arce 1989; Zagona 1994; Nishida 1994; De Miguel 1999). The reflexive morpheme se can be added to certain transitive sentences and although it is an optional element, the presence of the reflexive clitic entails the completion of the event as this example demonstrates: Juan se comió la manzana (en 2 min.*durante 2 min.) ‘John CL ate the apple in 2 minutes.’

⁵In more recent work, Ramchand (2008), Thompson (2006), but in particular MacDonald (2008), the valuing of telicity features is assumed to take place under Agree. Concerning the use of Agree as an alternative explanation—as suggested by an anonymous reviewer—instead of the covert vs. overt movement proposal, it could presumably provide an alternative explanation; however, it does not provide a more adequate description than the one already proposed. In more recent minimalist analyses, Agree is understood to be not only an agreement operation that checks features in a local relation, but also a long distance agreement operation without displacement. In previous conceptions of minimalism, long distance agreement takes place via covert movement of some feature to the specifier of the agreeing head at LF, thus establishing a local relation. If Agree substitutes for covert LF movement in the sense that eliminates the LF cycle, as the reviewer seems to suggest, we are still left with one more operation—Agree, but one less cycle—LF (but see Hornstein 2009 on Agree as a substitute for covert movement). Therefore, we could presumably say that children's difficulty with simple telic predicates is due to the lack of recognition of long distance agreement (checking of features) with the spec of the Aspect head. A similar explanation can be used in the case of locatum structures, in which a local relation is established via External Merge. Thus, it is unclear how the use of Agree (External and Internal Merge (Movement)) is more adequate in explaining children's lack of knowledge of long distance agreement than the explanation already provided.

⁶See Brigden (1983) and Heinämäki (1984) on Finnish aspect. However, see also Pereltsvaig (2000) on atelic predicates (statives) that contain accusative internal arguments and Kiparsky (1998) on the claim that boundedness and not telicity determines accusative or partitive case in Finnish.

⁷I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

⁸I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I comment about this latter point.