In this paper, the non-imitated utterances of more than two words of a Japanes child, a girl named Fumi, were analysed to clarify the process of development of syntactico-semantic structures expressed in Japanese-speaking children's multiword utterances. The child's speech was taperecorded for 4 consecutive days, for 2 hours a day in ordinary everyday situations in her home. The recorded non-linguistic context was used in the interpretation of utterances. Multiword utterances were counted, separately each month, by means of the number of types, not tokens, of utterances. There were 997 non-imitated multiword utterances in her speech samples over a period of five months, age 20 to 24 months old (Pre-grammatical combinations such as “Mommy, went,” e. g., vocative +holophrase, were eliminated).
The main results were as follows:
1) The number of words contained in a multiword utterance and the frequency of multiword utterances increased as her age increased month by month.
2) Clauses (e. g., utterances which consist of a semantic predicate with one or more arguments) containing a predicative verbal were more frequently than others (approximately 55%). Predicate nominal clauses were 10 to 12% at ages 21, 22, and 24 months, but their actual figures and percentages rose remarkably to 123, or 31% at 23 months. There were 82 adjectival clauses, 55 Kiteigo-Hikiteigo constructions (in English modifier-head nouns), mostly possesser-possessed, and 53 argument-argument constructions. Of the three-word clauses containing predicative verbal, argument-argu-ment-predicate constructions occured more frequently than argument-predicate constructions where an argument was expanded in a modifier-modified form.
3) Every predicate verbal clause including one argument was classified into 35 syntactico-semantic structures. Classification of the semantic role of arguments introduced in this study was based mainly on Suzuki's (1972b). Some constructions such as agent and act, object and act, subject of essive and verb, object of demand and verb, nonagentive and verb emerged early and occurred with high frequency, but other constructions emerged early, yet occurred with low frequency, such as location and verb, quotation and verb, and experiencer and verb. The most dominant constructions were agent-act and object-act. Some cases did not occur in this period, namely, object of attitude, object of condition, time of start or finish, duration, cause, and extent. New cases, for instance, instrument, comitative, conferrer, beneficiary, and factitive entered the child's speech later.
4) The objective case combined of transitive clauses with one argument happened earlier than did the agentive case. In the case of transitive oblique clauses, cases with the feature of [+directional] occurred more frequently than other cases.
5) Of all cases with the feature of [+directional], the case with the [+goal] occurred more frequently than the case with [+source]. As for circonstant, the cases signifying space occured earlier and more frequently than the cases signifying time. Of all locational cases, the case with [+directional] (‘to’ or ‘from’) occurred more frequently than [-directional](‘in/at’).
6) Generally speaking, in the constructions emerging early, the number of kinds of cases which combined with a particular verb was restricted to about one, but two or more were seen in the constructions that emerged later. Moreover, from the first one they often took the form of a construction including one predicate and two cases. Old cases combined with other old or new ones and made longer strings.
Methods of the analysis introduced in this study would provide us with methods for knowing the order in which Japanese-speaking children acquired how to construct early utterances of various kinds, although we analysed only child's utterances.
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