Slides

Table 3. No. of verb types before inflections
(Pine, Lieven and Rowland 1998)
Subjects -ing -s -ed
Rita 17 2 4
Joey 32 5 8
Julie 12 2 3
Jean 30 2 4
Ricky 8 2 1
Eva 11 8 2
Helen 4 2 -
Carl 11 - -
John 1 1 1
Simon 22 - 2
Olga 7 - -
Laura 4 - 1
Mean 13.3 2.0 2.2
Example 2 : V + CP (Diessel 2004)
A study of CHILDES data of five children covering the age range 1;7 to 5;1.
For all five children (Naomi, Peter, Nina, Sarah, Adam) the most frequent
complement taking verbs of the children's finite complement clauses are the following,
which constituted 80% of the tokens:
know, see, think, say, look (mean %: 22.9, 20.5, 19.0, 9.8, 8.8).
(I) think it's a cow. [Peter 2;2]
Know what that is [Nina 2;3]
Let's see if we can fix them. [Peter 2;3]
Diessel argues that most utterances that include a finite complement clause in early
child speech are simple nonembedded sentences containing a single proposition.
These 'matrix verbs' are epistemic markers, attention getters or markers of
illocutionary force.
2.4 Combinatorial versatility
There should be a certain degree of overlap in the cooccurrence patterns of various
members of the category.
Example: Aux + V (Pine, Lieven and Rowland 1998)
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