Himself and perhaps him, too? Pronouns in Hungarian child language

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Published: Aug 24, 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14232/jeny.2016.1.5
Keywords:
anaphor, Principle B, child language, experiment, personal pronoun, reflexive pronoun

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György Rákosi
University of Debrecen, Institute of English and American Studies
Enikő Tóth
University of Debrecen, Institute of English and American Studies

Abstract

In this paper, we report the results of two experiments on the acquisition of personal and reflexive pronouns in Hungarian child language. It is well-known from earlier studies on English and several other languages that while children perform well in the production and interpretation of reflexive anaphors, they show poor performance in tasks where personal pronouns with potential local antecedents are to be evaluated. The primary aim of our experiments was to gather evidence on whether this effect exists in Hungarian child language or not. We found that the Pronoun Interpretation Problem is present if the test sentences are not preceded by an immediate linguistic context in the experimental setting, but it seems to disappear when a minimal coherent discourse is created to facilitate the accommodation of the pronoun. Our results thus provide further support for analyses which claim that the Pronoun Interpretation Problem cannot simply be reduced to the assumed absence of Principle B in child language.

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How to Cite
[1]
Rákosi, G. and Tóth, E. 2016. Himself and perhaps him, too? Pronouns in Hungarian child language. Jelentés és Nyelvhasználat. 3, 1 (Aug. 2016), 99–116. DOI:https://doi.org/10.14232/jeny.2016.1.5.
Issue
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2016)
Section
Article
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biographies

György Rákosi, University of Debrecen, Institute of English and American Studies

György Rákosi is a reader at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen. His primary interest is in the grammar of argument structure and pronominal systems, but he is also interested in language acquisition and computational linguistics.

Enikő Tóth, University of Debrecen, Institute of English and American Studies

Enikő Tóth is currently lecturer in linguistics at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen. Her main fields of interest are semantics and experimental pragmatics

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