Linguistics Colloquium

Acquisition of Contrastive Focus in English and Russian

Speaker: Lydia Grebenyova

Location: Ballantine Hall (BH) - room 142

Date: Thursday 28 October

Time: 1:00 - 2:15pm

ABSTRACT: The study explores how children acquire the syntax of contrastively focused R-expressions in English and Russian. Syntactic properties of contrastive focus differ between English and Russian, which has been a subject of much theoretical work. Contrastively focused R-expressions tend to be fronted in Russian (and Slavic in

general) while they remain in situ in English. Moreover, wh-phrases in Slavic have been treated as inherently focused, based on multiple wh-fronting in these languages (Stjepanović 1998, Bošković (1999, 2002). This raises intriguing learnability questions: when and how do children acquire the syntax of contrastive focus and is there a parallel between acquisition of focus-fronting of R-expressions and acquisition of multiple wh-fronting in multiple wh-questions. Using elicited production test, a new experimental schema was developed for eliciting contrastively focused expressions from subjects in controlled contexts. The participants included 20 monolingual children acquiring Russian, 20 monolingual children acquiring English (ages 3-5) and 20 adult controls for each language. The results have shown that English-acquiring children have acquired the in-situ property of contrastive focus in their language quite early (by the age of 3).

However, Russian-acquiring children seem to take longer in acquiring the fronting property of contrastive focus in Russian. A parametric analysis is developed to account for this contrast. In addition, two focus positions are explored for Russian (high and low preverbal

positions) and their interaction with verb raising. The present results are then compared with those of a related study on acquisition of multiple wh-questions (Grebenyova 2005, 2006), showing a parallel between the two phenomena and arguing that they are likely to be a result of the same process. This supports the theoretical hypothesis that wh-phrases in Slavic are inherently focused.