Resumen de On the overgeneralization of the Intransitive/Transitive alternation in children's speech
Isabelle Barrière, Marjorie Perlman Lorch, Marie-Thérèse Le Normand
This study investigates the cross-linguistic patterns of the overgeneralization of the Intransitive/ Transitive alternations found in children's speech and provides new evidence from findings based on the acquisition of French. The morphosyntactic characterization of such phenomenon in English and Hebrew child language is followed by a description of the morphosyntactic characterization of such alternation in adult French which relies on an account of SE-affixation proposed by Werhli (1986). On the basis of this account, predictions are made with respect to the overgeneralization of the Intransitive/Transitive alternation displayed by French children's speech which is borne out by the data drawn from several corpora. In addition, this account is shown to explain the results of a comprehension task carried out by AnnibaldiVion(1980) which were previously unexplained.
