Abstract
This paper investigates discourse effects on the provision of both subjects and objects and investigates whether pragmatic discourse features govern the realization/omission of both constituents alike. In an elicitation study, we examined how the discourse-pragmatic feature contrast, as applied to the subject, verb or object of a transitive utterance affected the provision of elements in the remainder of the sentence when all elements were previously introduced. The results showed that 3;6-year-old children were more likely to realize a contrasted argument with a lexical noun, but more likely to omit the argument when it was not part of a contrast, regardless of its subject or object status. This suggests that contrast presents a unifying discourse feature for argument omission in language development.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 701-727 |
Number of pages | 27 |
Journal | Applied Psycholinguistics |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- argument omission, contrast, language acquisition, discourse