Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-8zxtt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T22:26:18.575Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Locative terms and Warlpiri acquisition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Edith L. Bavin
Edith L. Bavin*
Affiliation:
La Trobe University
*
Linguistics Department, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Cognitive complexity and complexity of linguistic structure have been found to influence the order of acquisition of locatives. In Warlpiri, locative terms are nominals and they are used in combination with a locative case marker on the reference object; directional affixes may be added to them. Data from a series of tests of Warlpiri children's comprehension and production of the Warlpiri expressions that may be translated as ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘in front of’, ‘behind’ and ‘between’ indicate that the locative case forms are used first without the more specific locative nominals; young children distinguish an ‘up-down’ dimension but not ‘in’, and the reference object influences how the locative term is interpreted; kamparru-pirdangirli (‘front-behind’) is not one dimension for children aged four to five years; kulkurru ‘between’ is understood before kamparru ‘front’ and pirdangirli ‘behind’; the use of features on a reference object for orientation develops at around six, but the orientation of the reference object, as well as features on the placed object may affect interpretation.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 1990 , pp. 43 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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.)

Footnotes

*

Preliminary versions of sections of the paper were given at the ALS meeting in Canberra, August 1987 and at a La Trobe seminar in October 1987. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for valuable criticism, and to the Yuendumu community for continued support and assistance. I thank, in particular, Kay Napaljarri Ross and Paddy Japaljarri Stewart for assisting with data collection. Initial funding for a long-term study of the acquisition of Warlpiri as a first language was provided to Bavin and Shopen by the Australian Research Grants Scheme and by the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies; La Trobe University School of Humanities has been very generous in providing additional funding.

References

REFERENCES

Bavin, E. L. (1987). Anaphora in children's Warlpiri. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. 10. 1–11.Google Scholar
Bavin, E. L. (1989). Some lexical and morphological changes in Warlpiri. In Dorian, N. (ed.), Investigating obsolescence studies in language contraction and death. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Bavin, E. L. (to appear). The acquisition of Warlpiri as a first language. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 3. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bavin, E. L. & Shopen, T. (1985). Children's acquisition of Warlpiri: comprehension of transitive sentences. Journal of Child Language 12. 597–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bavin, E. L. & Shopen, T. (1987). Innovations and neutralizations in the Warlpiri pronominal system. Journal of Linguistics 23. 149–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. (1973). Non-linguistic strategies and the acquisition of word meaning. Cognition 2. 161–82.Google Scholar
Clark, H. (1973). Space, time, semantics and the child in Moore, T. (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Cox, M. V. (1979). Young children's understanding of “in front of” and “behind” in the placement of objects. Journal of Child language 6. 371–4.Google Scholar
Cox, M. V. (1985). Deictic and non-deictic interpretations of in front of and behind in fronted object tasks. International Journal of Behavioral Development 8. 183–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, M. V., Batra, P. & Singal, S. (1981). A cross-cultural study of the young children's understanding of spatial prepositions. International Journal of Behavioral Science 4. 469–76.Google Scholar
Dromi, E. (1979). More on the acquisition of locative prepositions: an analysis of Hebrew data. Journal of Child Language 6. 547–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hale, K. (1982). Some essential features of Warlpiri verbal clauses. In Swartz, S. (ed.), Papers on Warlpiri grammar, Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A (6). Darwin: SIL.Google Scholar
Harris, L. & Strommen, E. (1972). The role of front-back features in children's ‘front’ ‘back’ and ‘beside’ placements of objects. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 18. 259–71.Google Scholar
Hill, C. (1982). Up/down, front/back, left/right. A contrastive study of Hausa and English. In Weissenborn, J. & Klein, W. (eds), Cross-linguistic studies of deixis and demonstration. John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Johnston, J. & Slobin, D. I. (1979). The development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian & Turkish. Journal of Child Language. 6. 529–45.Google Scholar
Laughren, M. (1978). Directional terminology in Warlpiri (a central Australian language). Working papers in Language and Linguistics (Launceton) 8. 1–16.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1982). Universal & particular in the acquisition of language. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Tanz, C. (1980). Studies in the acquisition of deictic terms. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Van Geert, P. (1985/6). In, on, under: an essay on the modularity of infant spatial competence. First Language 6. 7–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar