University of Groningen
Agent control and the acquisition of event culmination in Basque, Dutch, English, Spanish and
Mandarin
van Hout, Angeliek ; Arche, Maria J.; Demirdache, Hamida; García del Real, Isabel; García
Sanz, Ainara; Gavarró, Anna; Gomez Marzo, Lucía; Hommes, Saar; Kazanina, Nina; Liu,
Jinhong
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Proceedings of the 41st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development
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van Hout, A., Arche, M. J., Demirdache, H., García del Real, I., García Sanz, A., Gavarró, A., Gomez
Marzo, L., Hommes, S., Kazanina, N., Liu, J., Lungu, O., Martin, F., & Strangmann, I. M. (2017). Agent
control and the acquisition of event culmination in Basque, Dutch, English, Spanish and Mandarin. In M.
LaMendola, & J. Scott (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Boston University Conference on Language
Development (pp. 323-332). Cascadilla Press.
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Agent Control and the Acquisition of Event Culmination in
Basque, Dutch, English, Spanish, and Mandarin
Angeliek van Hout, María J. Arche, Hamida Demirdache, Isabel
García del Real, Ainara García Sanz, Anna Gavarró, Lucía Gómez Marzo,
Saar Hommes, Nina Kazanina, Jinhong Liu, Oana Lungu, Fabienne Martin,
and Iris M. Strangmann
1. Acquisition of Event Culmination
Verb meaning describes the temporal contour of an event.*Telic verbs
include a culmination point, whereas atelic verbs are continuous and lack such a
point. Tense-aspect marking interacts with telicity: telic verbs combined with
perfective aspect describe complete, culminated situations, whereas telic verbs
with imperfective aspect can be used to describe both complete, culminated
events as well as incomplete, non-culminating ones. Acquiring the language
used to describe event culmination thus involves two grammatical dimensions. i)
The learner must discover for all verbs whether or not the notion of culmination
is part of their lexical meaning, i.e. whether a verb is telic or atelic. ii) The
learner must find out for any given tense-aspect form in the language whether
culmination is entailed or implicated.
Previous studies across various languages have found that L1 learners
occasionally accept non-culmination for telic-perfective clauses: children
sometimes accept telic verb phrases combined with a perfective aspect form as
proper descriptions of ongoing or incomplete events (English, Polish and
Finnish: Weist et al. 1991; Dutch and English: van Hout 1998, 2008a; Mandarin:
Li & Bowerman 1998; Russian: Stoll 1998; German: Schulz et al. 2001 and
Wittek 2002; English: Wagner 2002; Spanish: Garcia del Real 2015). These and
several other studies show wide variation in the levels of non-culmination
*
Angeliek van Hout, University of Groningen, a.m.h.van.hout@rug.nl; Oana Lungu,
University of Nantes; María J. Arche, University of Greenwich; Hamida Demirdache,
University of Nantes; Isabel García del Real, University of the Basque Country; Ainara
García Sanz, University of the Basque Country; Anna Gavarró, Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona; Lucía Gomez Marzo, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Saar Hommes,
University of Groningen; Nina Kazanina, University of Bristol; Jinhong Liu, University
of Nantes; Fabienne Martin, University of Stuttgart; Iris M. Strangmann, University of
Groningen & CUNY. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research NWO (GraMALL, Grasping Meaning across
Languages and Learners), Basque Government (IT983-16 –GIC 15/129), and
MINECO/FEDER (Estudio de la Competencia Léxica y Gramatical de Individuos
Bilingües, FFI2015-68589-C2-1-P).
© 2017 Angeliek van Hout, María J. Arche, Hamida Demirdache, Isabel García del Real,
Ainara García Sanz, Anna Gavarró, Lucía Gómez Marzo, Saar Hommes, Nina Kazanina,
Jinhong Liu, Oana Lungu, Fabienne Martin, and Iris M. Strangmann. Proceedings of the
41st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. Maria
LaMendola and Jennifer Scott, 323-332. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
324
acceptance, depending on language, design, materials, task, verb type, object
type (for recent overviews, see van Hout 2016, submitted and Martin et al. in
preparation). The explanations for this phenomenon in this literature mention
various causes: types of telicity (predicate or compositional), problems with
perfectivity (aspect shift, aspect grammaticalization) and types of inference
(completion entailment or implicature).
In this paper we investigate if there is a connection between the acceptance
of non-culmination in child language and a seemingly similar phenomenon in
certain adult languages. In Mandarin, among other languages, adults accept
telic-perfective clauses for non-culminating situations. The types of verbs that
allow such readings are referred to as non-culminating accomplishments.
Recently, novel developments in semantic theory have established that subject
type plays a role in the acceptance of non-culmination in these languages.
According to the Agent Control hypothesis (Demirdache & Martin 2015),
denying the result as encoded by such accomplishment verbs is easier when the
subject’s referent is an intentional Agent than when it is an inanimate Cause.
Our study revisits non-target-like acceptance of non-culmination in learners by
asking: does non-culmination in child language reflect the same cause as nonculmination in languages like Mandarin?
2. Grammar of Event Culmination
According to formal-semantic theory, inferences of culmination depend on
the interaction of temporal properties of verbs and verb phrases—telic or
atelic—on the one hand, and grammatical aspect as expressed by tense-aspect
morphology and other tense-aspect markers—perfective or imperfective—on the
other. Telicity is sometimes determined by the lexical meaning inherent in the
verb: whether it includes an inherent result component (break, kill).
Furthermore, other elements in the verb phrase play a role, for example, particles
in the Germanic languages (eat up, blow out) and resultative verb-verb
compounds in Mandarin (qiao-sui ‘hit-break’). Moreover, for incremental theme
verbs, the quantization semantics of the direct object plays a role too (drink
water versus drink a glass of water) (Krifka 1989; Verkuyl 1993). Grammatical
aspect involves temporal perspective taking and is carried by tense-aspect
morphology and markers (Klein 1995). Perfective aspect involves the inclusion
of the run-time of an event in some reference time interval such that the whole
event from beginning till end is part of it; in other words, the event has reached
its completion or termination point after which it does not continue (e.g., the
child has washed (and so she is clean now)). Imperfective aspect involves the
inclusion of a reference time in the run-time of the event, so that the event was
ongoing at that reference moment and might in principle continue (e.g., the child
was washing, when the phone rang).
The typical inferences of the combination of telicity and grammatical aspect
are: i) a telic verb phrase plus perfective entails culmination; ii) a telic verb
phrase plus imperfective aspect lacks this entailment (Dowty, 1979). However,
there is an intriguing line of research in the semantics of typologically varied
325
languages that has shown that inference i) does not hold in all (adult) languages.
In languages in which inference i) does not hold, there are so-called nonculminating accomplishment verbs: telic change-of-state verbs, such as kill and
burn, which, when combined with perfective aspect, do not entail culmination,
but instead allow an incomplete event interpretation (Soh & Kuo 2005 for
Mandarin; Singh 1994 for Hindi; Pederson 1998 for Tamil; Bar-el et al. 2005
and Jacobs 2011 for two Salish languages). This is illustrated for Mandarin guan
‘close’ combined with perfective marker le: (1) is acceptable in a situation
where the agent makes an effort to close the door, but the door gets only
partially closed. (1) is even acceptable when the door is not closed at all, for
example, because something is blocking it (Liu, in preparation).
(1) Zhangsan guan-le
na shan men, dan men hai kai-zhe
Zhangsan close-PERF that CLF door, but door still open-DUR
‘Zhangsan closed the door, but the door was still open.’
Recent developments in semantic theory reveal that the type of subject
plays a role in judgments about the possibility of non-culmination with these
verbs (Demirdache & Martin 2015; Martin 2015; Martin & Schäfer 2015). Note
the contrast between (1) and (2) in Mandarin: when the subject is an intentional
Agent, as in (1), there is no contradiction. But when the subject is a natural
Cause, as in (2), a non-culminating situation is not a possible interpretation; the
but-phrase triggers a contradiction (Liu, in preparation).
(2) #Yi zhen da
feng guan-le
na shan men, dan men hai kai-zhe
One CLF strong wind close-PERF that CL door, but door still open-DUR
Intended: ‘The strong wind closed the door, but the door was still open.’
Investigating patterns associated with event culmination and different
subject types, Demirdache and Martin (2015) conclude that agentivity matters.
They generalize this as the Agent Control hypothesis (ACH): “Zero-result nonculminating construals require the predicate's external argument to be associated
with “agenthood” properties” (2015:201).
Building on Demirdache and Martin’s (2015) theory we develop a method
for experimentally testing the ACH, both in adults and children. The research
question is: Do incomplete event interpretations in children have the same
source as adults’ non-culminating construals in languages like Mandarin? We
investigate the hypothesis that children initially mistake their language as a
language that allows non-culminating construals. If so, child language, like
Mandarin, should reflect the ACH. Our prediction is therefore that there will be
higher acceptance rates of incomplete situations for Agent than Cause subjects
in telic-perfective sentences. All previous acquisition studies used Agent
subjects. In the present study we manipulate subject-type—Agent versus
Cause—and test to what extent learners of five languages (Basque, Dutch,
English, Mandarin and Spanish) accept non-culminating situations for telicperfective clauses with change-of-state verbs for both types of subjects.
326
3. Method
3.1. Participants
The participants were 3 and 5-year-old children learning Basque, Dutch,
English, Spanish and Mandarin (n=224) and adults (n=94), as shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Participants
3-year-olds
N (mean age)
Basque
Dutch
20 (3;6)
English
Spanish
20 (3;4)
Mandarin Mono 20 (3;4)
Mandarin V-V
20 (3;2)
5-year-olds
N (mean age)
20 (5;8)
20 (5;9)
23 (4;9)
20 (5;4)
20 (5;6)
20 (5;3)
Adults
N (mean age)
14 (30;0)
10 (22;6)
10 (23;4)
10 (n/a)
30 (33;6)
20 (33;5)
3.2. Design and materials
Participants were shown short movie clips showing events with either a full
change or no change at all, and with either an Agent or a Cause, as illustrated in
Figures 1 and 2. We chose zero-result rather than partial-result situations,
because situations with a zero result constitute the strongest case of nonculmination. For Mandarin, telic-perfective sentences are acceptable even in
those extreme situations, see (1) (Soh & Kuo 2005). Moreover, Wittek (2002)
found that German children occasionally accepted zero-result situations for
verbs like wecken ‘wake up’, as if it meant ‘try to wake up’. The comparison
between full versus zero-result situations will set a baseline for testing the ACH.
Table 2: Sample test sentences
English
Did the clown / explosion break the glass?
Basque
Pailazoak / Eztandak
edalontzia puskatu
al du?
clown-ERG / explosion-ERG glass.ABS break.PERF INT has
Dutch
Heeft de clown / explosie het glas gebroken?
has the clown / explosion the glass broken
Spanish
¿El payaso / La explosión ha roto el vaso?
the clown / the explosion has broken the glass
Mandarin
Xiaochou / Baozha sui-le
na-ge
bolibei ma?
mono
clown / explosion break-PERF that-CLF glass INT
Mandarin
Xiaochou / Baozha qiao-sui le
na-ge
bolibei ma?
clown / explosion hit-break PERF that-CLF glass INT
VV comp
Participants judged sentences with change-of-state verbs and perfective
marking, see Table 2. We used the present perfect in Basque, Dutch and
Spanish, the simple past in English, and verb marker le in Mandarin. The subject
327
argument was either an Agent (clown, pirate) or a Causer (explosion, storm).
The experiment thus has a 2x2 design, crossing Situation-type (Full / Zero) and
Subject-type (Agent / Causer). Seven transitive change-of-state verbs were
tested, once in each condition, varying the direct object referents: “break”,
“open”, “shut”, “destroy”, “blow out”, “cover up”, and “take off”.
For Mandarin, two paradigms were tested—monomorphemic verbs and
resultative V-V compounds, Table 2. Monomorphemic verb forms have been
argued to reveal the ACH effect, while resultative V-V compounds do not (Liu
in prep.). Using both paradigms allowed us to see if there were different effects
among these two types of Mandarin constructions.
Figure 1: Agent in full-result situation (“destroy”)
Figure 2: Agent in zero-result situation (“blow out”)
Figure 3: Cause in full-result situation (“blow out”)
Figure 4: Cause in zero-result situation (“destroy”)
328
4. Results
Culminating situations were accepted in all languages by all age groups and
are not shown in the graphs below. Figures 5—10 show mean percentages of
acceptance of telic-perfective sentences for non-culminating situations per
language. The graphs have Agent subjects (black bars) and Cause subjects (grey
bars) for 3-year-olds (left), 5-year-olds (middle) and adults (right). Note that no
3-year-olds have been tested for Basque and English yet.
Even though we do not present any analyses here, visual inspection of
Figures 5—8 shows no effects of Subject Type in Basque, Dutch, English and
Spanish. The results for Mandarin in Figures 9 and 10 show a different picture,
however: there is more acceptance of non-culmination in Mandarin than in the
other four languages, especially for Mandarin monomorphemic verbs, which all
age groups accepted to some extent for the zero-result situations (Figure 10).
Mandarin resultative VV-compounds were firmly rejected for zero-result
situations by the adults and 5-year-olds, whereas the 3-year-olds accepted them
to some extent (Figure 9).
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Figure 5: Results Basque
Figure 6: Results Dutch
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Figure 7: Results English
Figure 8: Results Spanish
329
Most importantly for our purposes, for the Mandarin monomorphemic
verbs, there seems to be an effect of Subject Type in the expected direction:
acceptance of zero result situations was higher for Agent subjects than for Cause
subjects, at least for the adults and 3-year-olds, not really for the 5-year-olds.
Future analyses are required to confirm the significance of these numerical
tendencies.
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Figure 9: Results Mandarin resultative V-V compounds
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Figure 10: Results Mandarin monomorphemic verbs
5. Discussion
This study asked if incomplete event interpretations in children have the
same source as adults’ non-culminating construals in languages like Mandarin,
as in example (1). Non-culminating interpretation patterns have been found in
several child languages: in contrast to adults, children learning Germanic or
Romance languages to some extent accept telic-perfective clauses for
incomplete or ongoing situations (Dutch: van Hout 1998, 2008a,b; English: van
Hout 1998, 2008a; German: Schulz et al. 2001 and Wittek 2002; Italian: van
Hout 2008b; Spanish: Garcia del Real 2015). Non-culminating accomplishment
verbs have been established for adults as possible descriptions of situations with
330
a partial or even a zero result in a different set of languages, including Mandarin
(Soh & Kuo 2005 for Mandarin; Singh 1994 for Hindi; Pederson 1998 for
Tamil; Bar-el et al. 2005 and Jacobs 2011 for two Salish languages). Such
interpretations have recently been argued to be governed by a requirement on
the agentivity of the subject. Demirdache and Martin (2015) advanced the Agent
Control hypothesis, which states that non-culminating accomplishment verbs
can only be used to describe situations with a partial or zero result if the subject
is an Agent, but not when it is a natural Cause, see example (2). We asked if this
constraint also governs children’s acceptance of telic-perfective sentences for
non-culminating situations, hypothesizing that Germanic and Romance learners
initially mistake their language as one that allows non-culminating construals,
like Mandarin. If so, we expected to see the ACH reflected not only in Mandarin
children and adults, but also in children learning Basque, Dutch, English and
Spanish, albeit not in adult speakers of these languages.
The results from Mandarin, in particular, those with monomorphemic verbs,
support the ACH, as there was an effect of subject type: more acceptance of
incomplete situations for Agent than Cause subjects. The results from the
present experiment for the other four languages, on the other hand, do not
support this hypothesis.
6. Conclusions
Bringing together two strands of literature—semantic analysis of nonculminating accomplishment verbs in adult languages on the one hand and the
acquisition of culmination inferences of telic-perfective clauses on the other—
this study has introduced a novel angle on the acquisition of event culmination
by looking at the role of Agent control for this inference. Our study provides for
the first time experimental support for the ACH for Mandarin monomorphemic
verbs in adults and children. The lack of effect in Basque, Dutch, English and
Spanish does not support the ACH in these languages (neither in children nor
adults), at least not in the present experimental set-up with zero-result situations.
Basque, English, Dutch, Spanish and Mandarin preschoolers as young as three
know that change-of-state verbs encode a full change, sometimes explicitly
marked in English and Dutch particles (van Hout 1996) and Mandarin
resultative V-V compounds (second V encodes a result state). They also know
that when these verbs occur with perfective aspect marking there is an
entailment of culmination.
Drawing a cautious and preliminary conclusion, we believe that these
results suggest that non-adult-like non-culminating construals—as reported for
L1 acquisition—do not have the same source as adult non-culminating
construals—as reported for languages like Mandarin. Further research should,
however, look into non-culminating set-ups with a partial result. Moreover, the
role of inherent verb semantics needs further exploration, in particular, the
difference between punctual change-of-state verbs as used it the present study,
331
durative change-of-state verbs (melt, burn) and incremental-theme verbs (eat,
build).
This conclusion brings us back to the acquisition phenomenon we set out
from: L1 learners in previous studies allow perfective-telic sentences for nonculminating events. The contrast between Germanic and Romance languages on
the one hand and languages like Mandarin on the other adds an extra acquisition
dimension to this phenomenon: how do L1 learners find out whether or not their
language has non-culminating accomplishment verbs that allow non-culminating
construals? And moreover, why are they initially overly liberal in languages that
do not allow such construals, as established in results coming from other studies,
and why not in the present study? We believe that further research on children’s
development of inferences in the domain of tense-aspect and other domains will
shed light on these questions.
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Proceedings of the 41st annual
Boston University Conference
on Language Development
edited by Maria LaMendola
and Jennifer Scott
Cascadilla Press
Somerville, MA
2017
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