Word Order in the Development of Dative Constructions: A Comparison of Cantonese and English

Abstract

This chapter investigates the development of word order of dative constructions in English and Cantonese speaking children. Corpus data from English monolingual and Cantonese-English bilingual children show that the children who are late in producing English prepositional datives also use the preposition to with fewer meanings and structures. It is argued that the ambiguity of English to influences the development of English prepositional datives. In contrast, Cantonese does not have ambiguity in its dative marker, and Cantonese monolingual children acquire serial verb datives (similar to English prepositional datives) before double object datives, exhibiting a pattern that is the opposite of English children’s. Also, it is shown that the order of emergence of different Cantonese dative constructions has a great impact on the acquisition of a language-specific inverted double object dative structure in Cantonese monolingual and bilingual children. Optionality per se does not slow down the development of a particular dative structure. Word order development in dative constructions is mainly affected by input ambiguity, and non-transparency in derivation also makes the Cantonese inverted double object datives difficult to acquire.