Argument Realization in Thai

In order to investigate how children come to interpret omitted arguments, four experiments are reported involving Thai-speaking adults, English-speaking adults, Thai-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds, and English-speaking 5-year-olds. Participants listened to nonce verbs in an intransitive frame embedded in short stories. Adults were tested in a forced choice comprehension test while children performed a sentence act-out task. Results revealed that adults and children in both language groups interpreted structurally intransitive novel verbs as having an unexpressed object argument when a potential object appeared as subject in the following sentence. This indicates that subjects made pragmatic inferences based on the discourse context: inferring an omitted object allowed them to preserve discourse coherence. Hence, in addition to syntactic bootstrapping, discourse context may be used as another cue in acquiring verbs.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Ratitamkul, Theeraporn

Contributors dc:contributor

• Goldberg, Adele E.
• Fisher, Cynthia

• Language, Linguistics

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3270007

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/82641