Acquisition of Passives and Transitivity Hierarchy

This study aims to offer an account of the acquisition of passives, which holds that children prefer constructing a structure with low transitivity, and thus Transitivity Hierarchy in Hopper and Thompson’s(1980) sense could account for the developmental order of passives. English has two types of passives, adjectival (lexical) passives and verbal (structural) ones. Child English data demonstrate that adjectival passives are acquired earlier than verbal ones. In generative grammar, researchers have contended that verbal passives involve syntactic movement of an argument, creating a chain, while adjectival ones do not, and thus early child English lacks an A(rgument)-chain, which matures later according to preprogrammed biological program. This is the ‘Maturation Hypothesis’ proposed and supported by Kenneth Wexler and his colleagues’ serial works. However, English-speaking children produce unaccusative sentences quite early, which also form an A-chain (Tomasello 1992, Han 1997). The proponents of the maturation program provided explanation for such apparently contradictory evidence, which is not without problems and counterevidence. I argue in this study that an alternative approach on the basis of the notion of ‘transitivity’ might provide a better account of the developmental gap between verbal passives and unaccusatives. That is, young children develop and/or utilize adjectival passives and unaccusatives earlier, which are low in transitivity. We will come to a conclusion that the notion of transitivity gives us a clue to explain the developmental pattern of syntactic structure in child language, along with other influential factors.