engleski

Animacy and Case in the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Croatian and Russian

In Croatian and Russian the predominant semantic factor in differentiating direct objects (DOM, Bossong 1998) is animacy and the marker is case inflection. However, the two systems differ with respect to which animate objects are obligatorily marked. In Croatian, eminine objects are Accusative case marked irrespective of animacy, masculine objects aremarked only if they are animate, while neuter objects are never marked. In Russian, singular d plural masculine and plural feminine objects are Genitive case marked if they are animate. For inanimate objects the Accusative form is identical with the Nominative. In the present study we investigate the acquisition of DOM in Russian and Croatian with a view to answering the following questions: (i) are children guided by the animacy constraint from the onset of acquisition? ; (ii) is the ‘gender/number constraint’ reflected in different acquisition patterns? Two longitudinal corpora (CHILDES format) of spontaneous monolingual child speech for each language (age range Russian 1 ; 5- 4 ; 0, Croatian: 1 ; 5-3 ; 0 ; total number of recorded hours investigated: Russian:75 ; Croatian:75) were uniformly analyzed. All marked objects were coded for gender, animacy and case inflection. Child data was compared to child directed speech and adult speech. The analysis reveals that DOM emerges very early (1 ; 7 in Croatian and 1 ; 8 in Russian) and is almost errorless in both languages. Overextension errors are rare (below 8% in both languages) and they are also attested in child directed speech. In Russian one notices a different error pattern across stages: erroneously Accusative=Nominative marked animate objects between 2 ; 00-2 ; 4, and erroneously Genitive marked inanimate objects between 2 ; 11- 3 ; 4. In Croatian, overextension targets inanimate masculine objects across stages. Our data indicate that children are guided by the animacy feature from the emergence of DOM: they differentially mark objects virtually target-like, irrespective of the gender/number constraint.

Differential object marking (DOM); animacy

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