Dr. Ellen H. Courtney of The University of Texas at El Paso Presents Learning Verbs: Evidence from Quechua

Quechua is an agglutinative, canonically SOV language spoken in several varieties by a few million people, primarily in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. For nearly 20 years, I have been investigating Quechua child language acquisition in different parts of the Peruvian Andes. In this presentation, I share highlights of my exploration of verb learning by two- to four-year-olds. The first part centers on the development of verb morphology, especially the subject- and object-marking inflections. In this regard, Pinker’s (1984/1996) account of inflectional learning proves useful yet limited. The second part of the presentation focuses on children’s acquisition of the argument structure of change-of-state verbs. The Quechua data reveal an interesting asymmetry in child errors, one which has been observed in a number of other languages. Finally, I briefly discuss proposals that might explain how Quechua-speaking children recover from these errors. Because (morpho)syntactic bootstrapping (Landau & Gleitman, 1985) would provide little help to Quechua-speaking children, I appeal to proposals emphasizing the role of conceptual and semantic criteria in verb learning, e.g., Fisher & Song (2006), Gordon (2003), Gropen, Pinker, Hollander & Goldberg (1994).

 

All are welcome.