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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/82641
Description
Title
Argument Realization in Thai
Author(s)
Ratitamkul, Theeraporn
Issue Date
2007
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Goldberg, Adele E.
Fisher, Cynthia
Department of Study
Linguistics
Discipline
Linguistics
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Language, Linguistics
Language
eng
Abstract
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.
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