9.3 The course of acquisition
9.3.2 Cue-based gender acquisition
The claim that children proceed from formal to non-formal analysis of the gender category leads to the following assumptions about the course of ac-quisition. Given that children base their initial hypothesis about gender on the formal properties of nouns, second declension masculine nouns (i.e.
papa-type nouns, male names in -a, and double gender nouns) should be as-signed feminine, while first declension nouns (i.e. hybrids and female names in -ok/-ik) should be assigned masculine. This means that at the earliest developmental stage (i.e. around age 2;0) children attribute nouns like e.g.
papa ‘daddy’ and mama ‘mommy’ to the same gender, since they are equiva-lent morphologically. In order to master the grammatical distinction between papa ‘daddy’ andmama‘mommy’, children must realize that sex distinctions have grammatical realization as well. The important question is how chil-dren deduce that semantics plays a role in gender assignment? What triggers children to recognize the dominance of the semantic rules?
I suggest that in the process of acquisition children rely on certain cues which are derived from the input and reveal how the gender system is orga-nized. Within the cue-based approach to language acquisition and change, cues have been defined by Lightfoot (1999:149) as “[. . . ] abstract structures manifested in mental representations which result from parsing utterances”.
More specifically, target input forms are used by language-learners as sources of cues which are not sets of sentences but mental representations in the inter-nal grammar, I-language, which result from parsing utterances. With regard to gender, I propose that the child, who scans the linguistic environment and seeks for designated cues, first discovers the following:1
(1) [N-Ø V-Ø] and [N-a V-a]
These cues trigger the acquisition of morphological rules, i.e. they reveal the correspondence between the morphological properties of a noun and the morphological properties of a verb (or any other target). In other words, exposure to a phrase stul upal ‘the chair fell’ or mama upala ‘mommy fell’
should trigger the analysis of a noun as a controller. These cues trigger the acquisition of two distinct grammatical classes based on the specific morpho-logical properties. They do not reveal anything about semantics, as there is a massive overlap of inanimate and animate nouns that have these repre-sentations. Therefore, only when the child finds the following cues, s/he can deduce that some other factor is at work here:
(2) [N-Ø V-a] and [N-a V-Ø]
For the child who already knows that nouns like e.g. stul ‘chair’ or mama
‘mommy’ command agreement on adjacent (or non-adjacent) elements, ex-posure to phases like vraˇc priˇsla ‘the physician came’ or papa priˇsel ‘daddy came’ should trigger the realization of biological sex as another factor that has grammatical function. As the mismatch between the cues in (1) and (2) reveals that the noun no longer controls the agreement, namely that formal
1The cues in (1) represent verbal agreement. The corresponding cues for adjectival agreement may be stated as follows: [A-ij/yj/oj N-a] and [A-aja/ija N-a]. In what follows I will only consider cues for verbal agreement, which are sufficient to illustrate the problem under scrutiny.
properties of a noun do not correspond to those on the targets, the child should figure out what it is that commands the agreement. I suggest this is the point when the child can retrieve that semantic/sex distinctions also co-occur with already familiar inflectional morphemes.
The structures in (2) suggest that there should be more than one semantic cue. Likewise in other grammatical domains, e.g. verb second (V2) syntax, it has been argued for the existence of separate input cues and not a single global cue (cf. Westergaard (2006)).2 Furthermore, I propose that each subtype of nouns should be represented by a separate semantic cue, such as those formulated in (3).3 The structures in (3) demonstrate that very specific information is included in the formal representation of each cue. In addition to the formal and semantic properties of a certain subcategory of nouns, the representations in (3) indicate whether gender is an inherent property of a noun or not. I use square brackets for nouns that have biological sex as part of their lexical semantic content. Round brackets indicate that gender is assigned via identification with a human referent.
(3) a. [[+male]N-a V-Ø] (forpapa-type nouns, male names in -a) b. [(+male)N-a V-Ø] (for double gender nouns referring to males) c. [(−male)N-Ø V-a] (for hybrids referring to females)
d. [[−male]N-Ø V-a] (for female names in -ok/-ik)
With regard to the nouns under investigation, a cue-based learner should further distinguish the following cues, which express the opposite gender value for the same lexical form:
(4) a. [(−male)N-a V-a] (for double gender nouns referring to females) b. [[−male]N-Ø V-Ø] (for female names in -ok/-ik)
c. [(±male)N-Ø V-Ø] (for hybrids referring to males or females) The semantic gender cues are thus manifested in the input through agreement and express evidence for different subtypes of nouns. In order to detect
2Westergaard (2006) extended the cue-based model proposed by Lightfoot (1999) to the acquisition of V2 vs. non-V2 syntax in different clause types in Norwegian (Tromsø dialect). She argues that there is no global cue for V2 syntax, as in the Lightfoot’s model, instead each clause is represented separately. Furthermore, Westergaard (2006; forth-coming) argues that children have knowledge of the clause types and the corresponding syntactic heads (this information is provided by UG) but further information related to the position of the verb in a certain structure must be triggered by primary linguistic data in the forms of cues. Given this, with regard to gender it may be suggested that UG provides children not simply with the category N, but the knowledge that N can be of different subtypes. However, what these subtypes are must be learnt from the input.
3Binary feature representation is used here for convenience.
these cues, children should pay attention to the relevant subtype separately, to acquire its specific gender characteristics. As suggested by the course of acquisition, and specifically by the non-simultaneous acquisition of the semantic rule across the subtypes of nouns, children indeed look for specific cues and pay attention to the notion of class.
Interestingly, at some later point of development, sex distinctions become of such great importance for children that they start applying the semantic rule to inanimate nouns. Consider for example the following conversation of a four-year-old boy with his mommy where he refuses to use the feminine nouncarapina ‘scratch’ to refer to himself; by changing the form of the noun tocarap he intends to emphasize his sex - now, when the word ‘looks like’ a first declension masculine noun, he can use it about himself (from ˇCukovskij 1965:374):
‘Mom, I have a scratch on my finger!’
b. MOT: Ne
‘If it were about Musja, she would havecarapina, but I am a boy!
I have carap.’
Of course, such examples when children try to “regularize” the input are rare, nevertheless, they are straightforward in showing how with age, children who have realized the relevance of the semantic criterion for the language, make an attempt to reanalyze the grammatical gender system on semantic grounds.4 The semantic gender cues formulated in (3) and (4), and specifically, the structures in (3-a) and (3-b), appear to be formal representations of seman-tic rule proposed in Section 6.4.4, example (5). The reader may recall the proposal I made in Chapter 6, namely that the semantic rule formulated by Corbett (1991), e.g. ‘nouns denoting males are masculine’, may to be too
4The mismatches discussed above can be one of the sources for this analysis. Another source may be agreement with personal pronounsja‘I’ andty‘you’ which is only controlled by the biological sex of the speaker or the addressee. In other words, the child’s triggering experience for semantic gender distinctions can be the structures without N and where sex is the only possible controller.
general. A child, who entertains two competing hypotheses at the same time, might need a more specific semantic rule, such as ‘nouns of declensional class II denoting males are masculine’, that could override a more general morpho-logical rule. The cues proposed in this section are thus formal representations of very specific semantic rules. The empirical facts about the acquisition of the semantic rule for various subcategories of nouns, and most importantly the differences in the course of acquisition, lend support for the idea of sep-arate semantic cues for each subcategory of nouns. In the next section I discuss these important differences within the cue-based approach, and in particular, consider the role of input in this process.