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| Author(s): |
Gustavo Andrade Nunes Freire
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem |
| Defense date: | 0000-00-00 |
| Examining board members: |
Ruth Elisabeth Vasconcellos Lopes;
José Ferrari Neto;
Rozana Reigota Naves;
Mary Aizawa Kato;
Rosa Attié
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| Advisor: | Ruth Elisabeth Vasconcellos Lopes |
| Abstract | |
This dissertation investigates, from the Generative Grammar framework, the linguistic acquisition of sentential complements to perception and causative verbs in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, PB) and English and their interaction with the acquisition of Theory of Mind. The fundamental relationship between language and extralinguistic cognition, the development of such relationship and what is missing in the linguistic mapping throughout children's development are investigated. More specifically, we investigate how children acquire perception and causative verbs and their sentential complements and we show that the ideal place to explain it is within Language Acquisition and Theory of Mind interface. We hypothesized that there is a correlation between the properties of the perceived event and language acquisition and to sustain it we highlight the differences between finite and infinitive complements. From them, it is anticipated that the acquisition of infinitival complements to causative and perception verbs is prior to the acquisition of finite ones, given the complexity of the latter type. We also examined the non-agentive perception verbs see and hear and attested that in addition to naming the sensory mode as auditory or visual, they also linguistically encode notions related to the speaker's knowledge and belief about the way a certain state of affairs in the world is perceived. The periphrastic causative verbs make and let are closely related to the causative modalities, which encode notions of intention and volition (whether in the subject of the main clause or in the subject of the embedded sentence). These properties are related, in a greater or lesser degree, to the development of Theory of Mind and to analyze how they relate to language acquisition we have administered experiments about each type verbal with about 95 children acquiring English and 95 children acquiring PB, between 4 and 9 years of age. In general, the results have shown that children tend to be strongly guided by the objective properties of the event, whereas the adult is able to process the available evidence to compute the perceived situation. The same can be said for the verbs make and let, because initially only their concrete and more general meanings are attested. For both verbal types we attested the child's grammar moves towards the adult one, showing that there is a relationship between the syntactic-semantic knowledge and the Theory of Mind development. The results corroborate the hypothesis that there is a correlation between the denoted event and its acquisition (AU) | |