Paths and Places: Aspects of Grammar and Acquisition

Abstract

This dissertation explores the underlying structural properties of spatial expressions, and the acquisition of these structures by children. In the first part of the dissertation I focus on directional axial expressions in Russian, and argue that their distributional and semantic properties are tightly related to their underlying syntactic structure. I present an original analysis of these items, and further suggest that the application of this analysis to a wider class of unbounded directional expressions in English and Russian makes it possible to compositionally derive their semantic properties from the underlying syntactic structure. In the second part of the dissertation we turn to the acquisition of spatial expressions by children. I report on a series of production and comprehension studies with monolingual Russian and Norwegian children, and propose a model for the acquisition of locative PPs, which states that child grammars at early stages involve an underspecified Place category associated with a generalized locative semantics. Finer-grained locative contrasts are taken to develop gradually, based on the acquisition of individual locative items from the input.