Argument Realization in Thai

137 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.In order to investigate how children come to interpret omitted arguments, four experiments are reported involving Thai-speaking adults, English-speaking adults, Thai-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds, and English-speaking 5-year-olds. Participants listened to nonce verbs in an intransitive frame embedded in short stories. Adults were tested in a forced choice comprehension test while children performed a sentence act-out task. Results revealed that adults and children in both language groups interpreted structurally intransitive novel verbs as having an unexpressed object argument when a potential object appeared as subject in the following sentence. This indicates that subjects made pragmatic inferences based on the discourse context: inferring an omitted object allowed them to preserve discourse coherence. Hence, in addition to syntactic bootstrapping, discourse context may be used as another cue in acquiring verbs.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD