Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T23:28:49.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2012

YULIA RODINA  and
MARIT WESTERGAARD
YULIA RODINA*
Affiliation:
University of Tromsø – CASTL
MARIT WESTERGAARD
Affiliation:
University of Tromsø – CASTL
*
*Address for correspondence: Yulia Rodina, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, University of Tromso, NO-9037 Tromso, Norway; e-mail: yulia.rodina@uit.no
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6–4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children rely on certain morphosyntactic micro-cues in the course of acquisition of semantic agreement. A discrepancy is observed in the acquisition of semantic agreement across the different noun classes, and this suggests that children are highly sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and morphology and use detailed input information to make specific inferences concerning the gender of different noun classes. Furthermore, we argue that acquisition data may provide a more accurate account of how gender assignment proceeds in the mind of a speaker than has been traditionally assumed by gender assignment theories.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 5 , November 2012 , pp. 1077 - 1106
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Berman, R. A. (1985). The acquisition of Hebrew. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), the crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, 255–371. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Chini, M. (1994). Strategie di acquisizione della categoria del genere grammaticale nell'italiano come lingua prima e come lingua seconda. In Giacalone Ramat, A. & Vedovelli, M. (eds), Italiano: Lingua seconda/lingua straniera, 405–436. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. G. (1982). Gender in Russian: An account of gender specification and its relationship to declension. Russian Linguistics 6, 197–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crockett, D. B. (1976). Agreement in contemporary Russian. Cambridge, MA: Slavika Publishers, Inc.Google Scholar
Gvozdev, A. N. (1961). Formirovanie u Rebenka Grammatičeskogo Stroja Russkogo Jazyka. Moscow: APN RSFSR.Google Scholar
Henzl, V. M. (1975). Acquisition of grammatical gender in Czech. Papers and Reports in Child Language Development 10, 188–200.Google Scholar
Iomdin, L. L. (1990). Avtomatičeskaja Obrabotka Teksta na Estestvennom Jazyke: Model′ Soglasovanija. Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language: A study of determiners and reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kuchenbrandt, I. (2005). Gender acquisition in bilingual Spanish. In Cohen, J., McAlister, K. T., Rolstad, K. & MacSwan, J. (eds), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB4), 1252–63. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Kuchenbrandt, I. (2008). Cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of grammatical gender?Working Papers in Multilingualism B:86. University of Hamburg.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T., Müller, N. & Cantone, K. F. (2002). Gender in monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition: Comparing Italian and French. Lingue e Linguaggio 1, 107–149.Google Scholar
Levy, Y. (1983). It's frogs all the way down. Cognition 15, 75–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lightfoot, D. (1999). The development of language: Acquisition, change and evolution. Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, D. (2006). How new languages emerge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lightfoot, D. & Westergaard, M. (2007). Language acquisition and language change: Inter-relationships. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(5), 396–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lopatin, V. V., Miloslavskij, I. G. & Šeljakin, M. A. (1989). Sovremennyj Russkij Jazyk: Teoretičeskij Kurs. Slovoobrazovanie. Morfologija. Moscow: Russkij Jazyk.Google Scholar
Macnamara, J. (1982). Names for things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mills, A. E. (1986). The acquisition of gender: A study of English and German grammatical development. Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N. (2000). Gender and number acquisition. In Unterbeck, B. & Rissanen, M. (eds), Gender in grammar and cognition, 351–99. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Panov, M. V. (1968). Morfologija i sintaksis sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo jazyka (Russkij jazyk i sovetskoe obščestvo: Sociologo-lingvističeskoe issledovanie: III). Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Popova, M. I. (1973). Grammatical elements of language in the speech of pre-preschool children. In Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development, 269–80. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Rodina, Y. (2007). What do asymmetries in children's performance tell us about the nature of their underlying knowledge? Norlyd 34(3), 230–51.Google Scholar
Rodina, Y. (2008). Semantics and morphology: The acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Roeper, T. (1999). Universal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 2(3), 169–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roeper, T. (2007). What frequency can do and what it can't. In Gülzow, I & Gagarina, N. (eds), Frequency effects in language acquisition: Defining the limits of frequency as an explanatory concept, 23–48 [Studies on Language Acquisition 32]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snyder, W. (2007). Child language: The parametric approach. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Švedova, N. Ju. (1980). Russkaja Grammatika. Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Westergaard, M. (2008). Acquisition and change: On the robustness of the triggering experience for word order cues. Lingua 118(12), 1841–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westergaard, M. (2009 a). The acquisition of word order: Micro-cues, information structure and economy [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 145]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westergaard, M. (2009 b). Usage-based vs. rule-based learning: The acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. Journal of Child Language 36(5), 1023–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Westergaard, M. (2009 c). Microvariation as diachrony: A view from acquisition. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 12(1), 49–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar