Source, Location, and Goal in Japanese Children's Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of this paper to demonstrate how the patterns of child acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Japanese may reveal the interactions among the three basic relational concepts, namely, SOURCE, LOCATION, and GOAL, in children's minds. These three concepts appear to form fairly symmetrical relationships at the structural or functional level: An entity X can be coded in a SOURCE-oriented relation (as in 'from X' in English), a GOAL-oriented relation ('to X'), or in a static, LOCATIVE relation ('in/at X'). Despite the apparent symmetry exhibited by the three concepts at the structural level, they do not seem to have equal status at the cognitive level. Previous studies, including Ikegami (1987), demonstrated that GOAL-type entities and SOURCE-type entities manifest themselves differently in many languages. Speakers tend to produce GOAL-oriented events much more frequently than SOURCE-oriented events in natural speech data (Stefanowitsch & Rohda, 1994), and children, as well as adults, show such bias towards GOAL in encoding motion events (Lakusta & Landau 2004). According to Ikegami (1987), the GOAL is invariably the most natural and more dominant element, while the SOURCE uncertain and unstable (1987: 135). While most of the previous studies have dealt with the asymmetry between GOAL and SOURCE, I am also interested in how LOCATION, which serves as a pivotal concept, interacts with GOAL and SOURCE. Is LOCATION more closely associated with GOAL or with SOURCE? Using three sets of corpus data taken from the CHILDES archive (Miyata-Aki corpus, Ishii-corpus, and Hamasaki-corpus), I examine the acquisition patterns of three different particles in Japanese, namely, Ni, De, and Kara, which are all associated with multiple senses including spatial senses: Ni marks GOAL, De LOCATION and Kara SOURCE. By determining the order of emergence and analyzing erroneous usages by children, I ask whether the patterns of acquisition differ among the three types of grammatical markers, and whether children tend to over- or under-use any particular type of grammatical markers. The preliminary results of the study have indicated that different grammatical markers are acquired differently, a finding consistent with McKercher (2001). It has also been found that children overuse LOCATIVE markers to mark GOAL, but not to mark SOURCE, suggesting the asymmetrical relationships between SOURCE, LOCATION, and GOAL. Further findings from this study will help us understand how the three concepts are related to one another and how children acquire such relationships. References Ikegami, Yoshihiko. (1987) 'Source' vs. 'goal': a case of linguistic dissymmetry. In R. Dirven, and G. Radden (eds.), Concepts of Case, 122-146. Tbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Lakusta, Laura M, & Barbara Landau. (2004) Starting at the end: the importance of goals in spatial language. Cognition 96, 1-33. McKercher, David A. (2001) The polysemy of with in first language acquisition. Stanford University doctoral dissertation. Stefanowitsch, Anatol, and Ada Rohde. (1994) The goal bias in the encoding of motion events. In K.-U. Panther and G. Radden (eds.), Motivation in Grammar, 249-267. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".