Motion events in Afrikaans: their expression by adult speakers and by children with and without language impairment

Barbara Höhle,Helena Oosthuizen,Frenette Southwood

doi:10.5842/40-0-5

Abstract

Motion events occur frequently in everyday life as people and objects constantly change their relative location to one another. Although children's descriptions of motion events resemble those of adults in their own language group from very early on (Choi and Bowermann 1991), there is increasing evidence for subtle differences as well. Young children speaking different languages seem to have some difficulty in expressing two types of spatial information in the same conceptual frame (e.g. Ochsenbauer and Hickmann 2010). In English and other satellite-framed languages such as German and Afrikaans, this task involves using a complex particle verb construction in which a directional particle (e.g. out) combines with a prepositional phrase carrying further information about the source or goal of movement (e.g. some bees came out of the tree) (Berman and Slobin 1994:161). Little is known about the development of this type of structure in satellite-framed languages such as Afrikaans. This paper examined whether (i) there are developmental differences between adults and 6-year-old Afrikaans-speaking children in the production of preposition+verb particle structures, and whether (ii) children with language impairment produce these structures in a different way than typically developing children. Target elements were preposition+verb particle structures with the particles af 'down', in 'in', uit 'out' and op 'up'. The performance of ten adults was compared to that of 30 typically developing and three language-impaired 6-year-olds. Half of the participants in the adult and typically developing groups were speakers of Mainstream Afrikaans (MA), and half were speakers of Cape Afrikaans (CA), a non-mainstream dialect. Distinct developmental differences that could not be attributed to dialectal variation, were found between 6-year-olds and adults. Children with language impairment showed less variation in their responses than their typically developing peers. Possible explanations for the findings are discussed.

Highlights

Motion events are those in which an entity moves from one location to another
3.1 Developmental patterns for prepositional phrases (PPs)+particle structures 3.1.1 Pattern of responses in the adult group The most important finding for the adult group was as follows: expected non-mainstream (CA) responses were only found for the particles in 'in' and uit 'uit', and not for af 'down' and op 'up'
Previous studies have noted that directional PPs in which the particles in and uit are semantically and phonologically identical to the preposition have gradually become more acceptable in Mainstream Afrikaans (MA) and are used interchangeably with more mainstream structures (Donaldson 1993; Ponelis 1979; Biberauer and Folli 2004)

Summary

Introduction

Motion events are those in which an entity moves from one location to another. Such events can be analyzed as consisting of the following main semantic components: (i) Figure, viz. the physical entity that is moving, (ii) Ground, viz. the point in space in relation to which the56 Helena Oosthuizen, Barbara Höhle & Frenette SouthwoodFigure moves, (iii) Path (in the sense used by Talmy 2000), viz. the direction and route followed by the moving entity with respect to the Ground and (iv) Manner, i.e. the way in which movement takes place. Motion events are those in which an entity moves from one location to another Such events can be analyzed as consisting of the following main semantic components: (i) Figure, viz. Satellite-framed languages such as English, German and Afrikaans, in contrast, typically express information about Manner in the verb, and about Path by means of so-called "satellites" This term encompasses a number of different grammatical forms − e.g. English verb particles, and German separable and inseparable verb prefixes − employed by different languages to express information about Path. We consider its use by adult speakers as well as by children with and without language impairment

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