On the overgeneralization of progressive marking onstative verbs: bioprogram or input?*
YASUHIRO SHIRAI, Daito Bunka University
ABSTRACT
Although several researchers have claimed that overgeneralizationof progressive markers rarely, if ever, occurs, the validity of suchclaims has been questioned. In this study, the spontaneous speechof three children acquiring English, and of their mothers, wasanalysed for their use of verbs with respect to stativity andprogressive marking. The results show that overgeneralization ofprogressive inflections to stative verbs does occur, and that themother of a child who frequently produced stative progressivesalso used stative progressives substantially, while the other twomothers never used them in speech addressed to their children.The strong association observed between maternal speech and thepattern of children’s use of verb morphology casts doubts on theclaim that the lack of overgeneralization is innate (Bickerton1981). A prototype account of the phenomenon is proposed as analternative.
INTRODUCTION
It has been claimed that children do not overgeneralize -ing to state
* This paper is based on an extract from a doctoral dissertation submitted to
University of Califorma, Los Angeles. I would like to thank Roger Andersen forhis guidance in the research, and Nonko Akatsuka, Patricia Greenfield, EvelynHatch and John Schumann for their helpful advice. I would also like to thankBrian MacWhinney for providing the data through CHILDES, and RogerAndersen, Kevin Gregg, Stephen Matthews, Shigenon Tanaka and two
anonymous reviewers for commenting on an earlier version of this paper. I am
especially indebted to Patnck Gonzales and Foong-Ha Yap, who gave extensivecomments. The results of the study were presented at the 6th International
Congress for the Study of Child Language held in Tneste, Italy, in 1993. The
writing of this paper is partially supported by a Grant-Aid for Scientific Researchfrom the Japan Ministry of Education under Grant No. 05881078. Address for
correspondence: Yasuhiro Shirai, Department of English, Daito Bunka
University, 1-9-1, Takashimadaira, Itabashi, Tokyo 175, Japan.
First Language, 14 ( 1994), 067-082 Pnnted in England 067-0
68
verbs such as see, look, want (Brown 1973, Kuczaj 1976, 1978).Bickerton ( 1981 ) claims that this is due to the State-Process Distinction(SPD), which he argues is at work both in the creolization process andin first language acquisition. Cziko & Koda (1987) and Cziko (1989),supporting Bickerton, claim that this distinction is marked very early inthe first language acquisition of various languages. The claim,therefore, is that the stative-verb restriction on progressive inflections isa universal of language acquisition, and Bickerton specifically claimsthat this distinction is part of the ’bioprogram’ that children are
endowed with.It has been reported that in English children never incorrectly attach
the progressive marker to state verbs (Brown 1973).’ Brown (1973:324) states:
The children do use a small number of state and involuntary verbsrather often, especially want, like, need, know, see, and hear, andthey never put these verbs in the progressive form.
Based on Brown’s and Kuczaj’s studies, Bickerton (1981: 155), in
support of his State-Process Distinction, states:
... just as there are verbs that do not take -ed, there are verbs thatdo not take -ing ..., such as like, want, know, see, etc. These verbsare quite common in children’s speech, probably as common asmany of the irregular verbs to which children incorrectly attach-ed. Yet, apparently children never ever attach -ing to stativeverbs.
The claim that there is no overgeneralization of progressive on to
stative verbs in the acquisition of English as a first language, althoughquestioned by some researchers (e.g., Aitchison 1983), has heretoforenever been seriously challenged.
This claim appears to have two assertions implicit in it: (1) somestate verbs never receive progressive marking in adult grammar, and(2) children who often make overgeneralization errors never makeerrors of attaching -ing to state verbs. Both these assertions, however,can be contested.
First, although attaching the progressive inflection to stative verbs isoften treated as ungrammatical, adult native speakers frequently use
[1] Kuczaj (1978: 167) states that ... unlike other verb and noun inflections, theprogressive is rarely, if ever, overgeneralized to inappropriate forms.’ In fact,Kuczaj (1976, 1978) reports that he found only one possible overgeneralization(seeing) in a large sample of recordings (a total of 221 hours) from 15 children.
69
stative progressives in speech. As Smith (1983) points out, stative verbscan be progressivized to impose viewpoint aspect. For example, theverb want, which denotes an internal state that is usually regarded asincompatible with -ing, is acceptable in the progressive form in casessuch as ’Are you wanting the suitcase down?’ (Brown 1973: 323)where the progressive marker specially imposes a sense of contingency(at this moment do you want to take the suitcase down?). Therefore, itis not always easy to say wanting is ungrammatical, as has been
assumed, for example, by Bickerton (1981: 155).2Such fuzzy boundaries between grammatical and ungrammatical
sentences make it difficult to verify the claim that children NEVERovergeneralize (i.e., incorrectly attach) the progressive marker to stativeverbs (Kuczaj 1989). Since it is often difficult to determine which usesof stative progressives are grammatical or ungrammatical, it is no easytask to determine which tokens in children’s speech are examples ofovergeneralization. For example, if a child says, ’I am wanting X’ it isusually regarded as incorrect. On the other hand, if an adult says, ’Areyou wanting the suitcase down?’ it is treated as a creative use of the
progressive.Second, the claim that children never make errors of attaching -ing
to state verbs appears to be suspect. Consider, for example, GaryCziko’s attempt to test the State-Process Hypothesis, in spite of thedifficulties of operationalization discussed above. First, Cziko & Koda
(1987) claimed that in the acquisition of Japanese by a child, presentprogressive forms were never used with stative verbs. Second, Cziko(1989), in reviewing 13 acquisition studies of 9 languages, also claimedto have found support for the State-Process Distinction as a universal of
language acquisition. Such claims, however, met severe criticisms,mainly on methodological grounds (Kuczaj 1989, Weist 1989, Youseff1988, 1990). More important, Rispoli (1990) criticized Cziko & Koda’sclaim by citing an error observed by Horiguchi ( 1981 ), in which a childused an ungrammatical form atteiru - an overgeneralization of
progressive marker (-teiru) to state verb a(r)- ’exist.’ Moreover, twoexperimental studies have shown that children do produce over-
generalized progressive inflections. Mapstone & Harris (1985) foundthat 10 out of 22 children used stative progressives of the sort claimedto be incorrect by Bickerton (1981), such as seeing, wanting. A recent
[2] Bickerton (1981:155) indeed claimed that ’there are verbs that do not take -ing(with certain qualifications, see Sag 1973), such as like, want, know, see, etc.’ Aswe shall see below, the ’certain qualifications’ are crucial for this claim, butBickerton did not discuss the qualifications in any detail.
70
study by Li (1989) showed that Chinese children acquiring Mandarinused the progressive marker zai quite often with stative verbs (for thegroup of age 5, 22% of all uses of zai) even though such use is
ungrammatical in adult grammar.3 Thus it appears that the issue ofwhether there is overgeneralization of -ing is still wide open.
Another issue is whether the claimed lack of overgeneralization isinnate. Bickerton claimed that the State-Process Distinction is innate,or bioprogrammed, thereby preventing children from incorrectly usingprogressive with stative verbs. On the other hand, as an alternativeexplanation, it has been suggested that the lack of overgeneralization isdue to input and interaction (Kuczaj 1989, Li 1989, Rispoli 1990). Inother words, it is due to the influence of the caretaker’s speech. Brown
(1973: 326-327) reported data supporting this possibility. He looked atthe speech of Eve’s mother in the samples that preceded Eve’s
productive use of -ing, and found no involuntary state verbs in
progressive form.4 However, other than Brown’s, there has not been anyextensive data-based study to explore this possibility, i.e., the influenceof caretaker speech on children’s use of stative progressives.
In sum, there are two issues involved, which are to be investigated inthe present study:
(1) Is it really the case that children (almost) never
overgeneralize -ing to stative verbs in the acquisition ofEnglish?
(2) Is it innateness/bioprogram that prevents children from
making such errors? Does caretaker speech have anyinfluence on the pattern of children’s acquisition?
METHOD
Data
This study used data consisting of the transcribed speech of threechildren: Adam from age 2;3 to 4; 10, Eve from age 1;6 to 2;3, and
[3] It is understandable that these experimental studies found so many overgeneral-izations, since in experimental production children often have to perform beyondtheir limitations, in which case there may be some ungrammatical linguisticbehaviour which may not be observed in spontaneous production. In the case ofspontaneous speech, children can restrict their production to within their
linguistic capacity. As Bickerton’s argument (no overgeneralization of the
progressive marker to stative verbs) rests on spontaneous data in Brown (1973),this methodological factor should be taken into account.
[4] However, Brown did not attribute the lack of overgeneralization to the mother’sspeech. See Brown (1973) for the discussion.
71
Naomi from age 1;6 to 4;9.5 These data, taken from the CHILDES(Child Language Data Exchange System; MacWhinney & Snow 1985,1990) corpus, were selected from the larger corpus for two reasons.First, the data extend over a long period of acquisition, which is
necessary to see how mothers’ speech and children’s speech changeover time. Second, the data include relatively early stages of languagedevelopment, which is necessary to see the emergence of verbal
morphology and its relationship with caretaker speech.The transcriptions of the mother-child interactions were provided on
diskettes in the form of Microsoft Word files. The selection of the files
to be coded was based on three considerations: (a) obtaining themaximum differences in time between stages,’ (b) obtaining comparabledata representing the same level of language development (as measuredby MLU) for the 3 children for each stage, and (c) obtaining a
comparable amount of data for each stage for each subject. Table 1 lists
the files chosen to be coded.
TABLE 1. Files of the data coded
Note. The data for Eve terminate at age 2;3 in the corpus provided.
CodingAll finite verb forms with progressive marking in the speech of thechildren and their mothers were coded for four semantic categories ofstate, activity, accomplishment, and achievement (based on Dowty1979, Mourelatos 1981, Vendler 1967), although what is relevant inthis study is only the state vs. non-state distinction.’ Following Weist,Wysocka, Witkowska-Stadnik, Buczowska & Konieczna (1984),objective linguistic tests were used to classify verb tokens. Amongnumerous tests for stativity (e.g., Dowty 1979), the following was
[5] Adam’s and Eve’s data are from Brown (1973); Naomi’s data are from Sachs(1983).
[6] Four stages of development were established to answer research questionsconcerning the change over time in the pattern of language use by caretakers andchildren; these questions, however, are beyond the scope of this paper.
[7] The four-way classification was done as part of a larger project (Shirai 1991).
72
chosen for the present study:
Does the verb have a habitual interpretation in simple presenttense? If so, it is non-state. If not, it is state.
Here, habitual interpretation can be understood as habituality thatinvolves a repeated situation. For example, I go to school has a habitualinterpretation since it involves repetition of the same situation of goingto school. On the other hand, I love you does not involve repetition ofloving. Thus, the former is classified as non-stative, and the latter asstative. This particular test was chosen among many stativity tests sinceother tests do not always yield a clear-cut distinction between stativesand non-statives, mainly because most of them involve acceptabilityjudgement. For example, one of the more common tests for stativity isthat state verbs are ungrammatical when used in the imperative (e.g.,*Have a job. *Know the answer.). However, this is not always the case(e.g., Know when to say when!). This problem is inevitable since thedistinction between acceptable and anomalous sentences is not alwaysclear-cut (Labov 1975). The test chosen for this study does not involvethis problem. It relies on the interpretation of a sentence (whether ornot it involves repetition of a situation), which is much more
straightforward than making acceptability judgments. This test is alsoappropriate since it is different from most other stativity tests in notbeing a test for agency or self-controllability, properties that are notaspectual values, as pointed out by Brinton (1988).A check of intra-rater reliability of the coding was performed two
years after the original coding was done. A randomly selected 100tokens were once again coded into four classes of achievement,accomplishment, activity and state; 93 out of the 100 tokens were giventhe same coding as the original coding. As far as the distinction betweenstate and non-state is concerned, 98 had the same coding; that is, 98%reliability is obtained regarding state vs. non-state classification.
It must be noted here that the test used in this study is meant to defineoperationally the distinction between stative and non-stative verbs, andthus not all the verbs coded as statives are ungrammatical whencombined with -ing. As discussed above, some stative progressives areperfectly natural. Only a subset of stative pro-gressives are overgeneral-izations of -ing, and indeed it is often difficult to determine when thestative progressive is being used ungrammatically.
RESULTS
First, I will present all the finite verbs from the children’s speech which
73
were both given progressive marking and coded as state, and then I willdiscuss the problems involved in defining overgeneralization. I will
then discuss the children’s use of the stative progressive in relation tomaternal input.
Table 2 lists all stative progressives used by Eve (5 tokens) andNaomi (23 tokens).’
There are two observations that can be made which run counter to
the two assumptions held by Bickerton (1981), Brown (1973) andKuczaj (1978). First, many of the stative verbs are not at all
incompatible with the progressive marker. Progressive aspect in suchpatterns as X is feeling Y, X is being Y, etc. are often used to imposetemporariness on states that are usually expressed by simple presenttense: X feels Y, X is Y. Examples in Table 2 include (7, 8, 9, 10, 22, 28)feeling better/OK/well, and (21) my tummy is hurting. Second, whatBickerton (1981) claimed to be overgeneralized uses of progressivemarking was found in the children’s speech; examples include (1)seeing it it, (6) seeing Mikey, (18, 19, 20) seeing (the) light, (16, 17)loving Georgie (= doll), and (27) having all these toys now. These dataindeed show that the assumption that children (almost) never
overgeneralize progressive to state verbs is not necessarily tenable.Another important finding was that Naomi used stative progressive
much more frequently than Adam or Eve. This, I will argue, can be
explained by the influence of the mother’s speech. First of all, Adamused the stative progressive only once out of 274 tokens of -ing in thesamples coded, and that one example could as well be coded as anactivity, not a state (see footnote 8). Similarly, his mother never used astative progressive even though she used the progressive 138 times inthe samples coded.
By contrast, Naomi used the stative progressive much more
frequently, 23 times out of 668 uses of the progressive. It is noteworthythat Naomi’s mother, unlike Adam’s, used the stative progressive quiteoften: 20 tokens9 out of 512 total uses of the progressive. The contrast
[8] The stative progressive was found once in Adam’s speech coded for this study:*ADA: with a leg on it # with a leg # standing like dis.
(Adam, 3;1, stage 2)
This token was not included in the discussion, however, since it is a most
marginal case of stative, and I had difficulty deciding between activity and state.Stand is mostly coded as an activity in the present study, based on the operationaltest discussed earlier. In this connection, Eve’s (5) I going bare back might alsorequire a separate consideration since it is such a marginal case.
[9] Stative progressives used by Naomi’s mother are: sticking up/out, wanting,seeing, loving, having trouble, hurting, being + adjective/noun, and feeling.
74
TABLE 2. Stative progressives used by the children
Note. Some notations are specific to CHAT format used for CHILDES transcripts (seeMacWhinney 1991 )
between Adam and Naomi appears to suggest the influence of
motherese.
Eve’s case, however, is ambiguous. Eve used the stative progressive5 times out of her 217 total uses of the progressive, while Eve’s mothernever used the stative progressive although she produced 209 tokens ofthe progressive. If we try to account for the children’s use of stativeprogressive by the influence of mother’s speech, Eve’s case is
problematic.To make a fair comparison controlling for the discrepancies in raw
frequency count, percentages are compared between the three mother-child pairs&dquo; (Table 3).
[10] The percentages here are averages for all four stages, since collapsing differentstages using a raw frequency is not valid. The average percentages are the sum ofthe percentages of stative progressive at each stage divided by four (or three for Eve).
75
TABLE 3. Stative progressives as percentage of progressives usedby the three children and their mothers
As stated above, Naomi’s and Adam’s data appear to suggest themother’s influence on the child’s use of stative progressive. However,Eve’s case is not so clear. Here, let us again look at the stative
progressive used by Eve in sentences (1) to (5) in Table 2. It should benoted that 3 of the 5 uses of Eve’s stative progressive involve being,which I will argue is qualitatively different from other cases of thestative progressive. The ordinary progressive involves attachment of-ing to the verb stem. The progressive involving being, on the otherhand, does not appear to involve this type of inflection, at least for Eveat 2;0; see the following:
The contrast is clear; the seelseeing pair involves attachment of -ing toa verb stem, while the second pair only involves the addition of beingas a lexical item. It is very likely that being is treated by Eve as alexical item which gives a sense of contingency/temporariness. It
should also be noted that the three cases of being were used during thesame recording session, and Eve’s use of being was prompted by thefather’s utterance You’re being silly, which started an exchange inwhich ’being silly’ was used six times:
76
This shows that her use of ’being + adjective’ was not productive atthis point. Interestingly, she used being as a contingency marker a fewminutes later, creating an inappropriate use of being as in (4) while mebeing sitting on it (see Table 2). This suggests that she was using beingas an unanalysed lexical item, at least at this stage of her development.
The point here is that the use of being as a stative progressive may bequalitatively quite different from other cases of the progressive involvinga morphological operation of attaching -ing to the bare verb, which isan unmarked, all-purpose form for the child at this stage (Brown 1973).Based on these considerations, I excluded the cases involving being,and calculated the percentages again.&dquo; (Naomi also has two uses ofbeing, which are excluded here.) Results are presented in Table 4.
TABLE 4. Stative progressives as percentage of progressives used by thethree children and their mothers (excluding cases of being)
If the stative progressive being is excluded, since it should probably beregarded as a lexical item rather than application of the progressivemorphology, the relationship between motherese and children’s
production becomes clearer. The relationship is represented in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Relative use of stative progressives by mother and child
[11] Since the percentages are calculated based on token counts, one might wonder whethertype count would reveal a different trend. Since there was only one type of stativeprogressive for Adam (see footnote 8) and two types of Eve, while there were 8different verb types for Naomi, the trend is the same for both type and token counts.
77
DISCUSSION
The results can be summarized as follows:
(a) Overgeneralization of progressive inflections to stative verbs wasobserved.
(b) The child who showed such overgeneralization more frequentlythan the other children had a mother who used stative progressiveswhile the other two mothers never used the stative progressive.
The above findings are significant in that they show that despiteprevious claims (Bickerton 1981, Brown 1973, Kuczaj 1978), a child,Naomi, does show overgeneralization of the progressive to stative
verbs, and that this may be due to the pattern of the input addressed tothe child by the mother.
Although the data reveal cases of overgeneralization, some
disclaimers are in order. Essentially, these are disclaimers related tomethodological problems discussed earlier in defining overgeneral-ization. First, as discussed earlier, the borderline between acceptableand anomalous sentences is not always clear-cut. This is a problem ofoperationally defining ’overgeneralization’ (i.e., incorrect use of stativeprogressives); see also Aitchison 1983, Kuczaj 1989 and Meisel 1983on this point.
Secondly, there is a circularity problem stemming from the difficultyin interpreting the children’s intended meaning. For example, it is
possible that when Naomi said ’I loving Georgie’ her intended meaningwas ’I am showing my affection to Georgie’, or ’I am taking care ofGeorgie.’ If this interpretation is accepted, even though this is an
apparent ungrammatical use of stative progressive, it cannot be treatedas a counterexample to the claim of no overgeneralization.I2 However,this kind of interpretation certainly creates a circularity problem.Whenever an apparent overgeneralization is found, it is possible toargue that the child is using it as a non-stative verb.&dquo; Even worse, it
could be argued that overgeneralization is a lexical problem; seeingMikey could be explained by arguing, ’The child does not yet know thedistinction between see and look at. What he means here is looking at
[12] In this case, this indeed was a possible reading. The context for I loving Georgiewas that Naomi was playing with dolls, and appears to have been doingsomething with Georgie.
[13] The difficulty is further aggravated by the fact that by using progressive markingthe speaker can present state as dynamic situation (Smith 1983).
78
Mikey.’ This creates a serious confirmation bias in testing the State-Process Hypothesis.
It is interesting that Adam’s and Eve’s mothers never used stateverbs with the progressive inflection. As stated earlier, the stative
progressive is not uncommon in adult speech (Smith 1983). Indeed,certain stative progressives are very naturally used in adult speech (e.g.,I am feeling better- now; I am having trouble). Why then did Eve’s andAdam’s mothers not use stative progressive? I claim this is due to
simplification; i.e., avoidance’4 of the marked structure by the twomothers. If we exclude Naomi’s mother, it is clear that the mothers didnot use the stative progressive, which is probably a very marked
member of the progressive, while in adult-adult discourse, stative
progressives appear to be frequently used. This may be due to the ’lessbasic’ or non-standard (Smith 1983, 1991) nature of the stative
progressive. As has been observed in motherese studies, native
speakers use more basic structures of language when talking to children(see, for example, Clark & Clark 1977, Snow 1977), thus avoidingwhat is assumed to be complex structures. It is not surprising then thatmothers tend to avoid using the stative progressive in speech addressedto children.
It appears that Naomi’s mother, who used the stative progressivefrequently, was also aware of the marked nature of the stative
progressive. See the following segment of speech addressed to Naomiby her mother at stage 1:
(32) *MOT: you-’ve got all your dollies.*MOT: doggie # doggie # baby # lamb # kitty # doggie #
doggie # bunny # elephant # bear # and lamb.*MOT: they-’re all wanting to have coffee.*MOT: all want to have coffee.
(Naomi, 1;8)
After the mother said ’they are all wanting to have coffee,’ using astative progressive, she said, ’all want to have coffee.’ Perhaps she(unconsciously) felt this kind of marked use of progressive was toomuch for the child at 1;8, and rephrased it by using a more unmarkedstructure, even though she used stative progressive much more
frequently compared with Adam’s and Eve’s mothers.
[14] Although the term avoidance is used here, it does not mean the avoidance isconscious. It simply means mothers/caretakers fail to use particular linguisticpatterns.
79
The findings in this study cast doubts on Bickerton’s State-ProcessHypothesis as it relates to child language acquisition. His originalclaim, and also Cziko’s (1989), was that children never overgeneralizethe progressive marker to stative verbs. Bickerton (1981: 158) states:
[T]he use of progressive -ing with statives would surely appear, toa child not programmed with the SPD, to be the most naturalthing in the world. For -ing is applied to verbs with presentreference, and when a child wants or sees or likes something, it isright now that he does it. *I wanting teddy (now) or *I seeingpussy (now) would surely appear, to such a child, every bit asgrammatical as I playing peekaboo (now) or I sitting potty (now).Nobody could claim that the distinction emerged from experience,or from context.
This claim, however, was not supported in the present study. In fact,both Naomi and Eve used I seeing X. Wanting was not used by anychild, but it was used by Naomi’s mother. In addition, children’s use ofthe stative progressive appears to be due in large measure to mother’sinput, notwithstanding Bickerton’s innateness claim.
Although Bickerton’s strong claim has not been supported, the factremains that the overgeneralization of the progressive marker is rare,and this phenomenon needs to be explained. I would argue that this isdue to the acquisition of the progressive marker as a prototypecategory. As has been observed (e.g., Slobin 1981), children originallydo not use a morphology to its full potential as it is used in adult
speech. They start with a small subset (i.e., the prototype) of thesemantic category that a morphological form signifies, and only laterdo they acquire full potential of the morphology by extending itssemantic boundary. In the case of past morphology, Taylor (1989: 243)suggests that the prototype is ’completion in the immediate past of apunctual event, the consequences of which are perceptually salient atthe moment of speaking’ and that children’s use of past morphology isinitially limited to this meaning. In the same vein, it may be argued thatthe prototype of progressive is ’action in progress’ (Shirai 1991). If so,children are unlikely to use the progressive with stative verbs at earlystages, much less to extend it to a wrong context, since such uses arefar from the prototype of the progressive as a semantic category.
In fact, as far as past and progressive in English are concerned, thisprototype scenario holds up quite well. The progressive inflection is
initially used predominantly with activity verbs, e.g., writing,swimming, sitting, eating, crying, drinking, while the past inflectionstarts with punctual verbs, e.g., broke, fell, lost, spilled, found (Bloom,
80
Lifter & Hafitz 1980, Shirai 1991). Activity verbs, if combined with aprogressive marker, yield an action-in-progress meaning, which formsthe prototype meaning for progressive. Progressive inflections with
stative verbs, on the other hand, may be the least prototypical of thecategory ’progressive’, since the progressive inflection is generallyincompatible with state verbs, as discussed earlier. Moreover, the
stative progressive may not normally be used by mothers/caretakersspeaking to their children, and therefore stative progressive in the inputmay simply be absent. It is therefore not surprising that children
seldom use progressive with stative verbs incorrectly.This scenario of prototype formation and category extension can
account not only for the lack of overgeneralization of the progressivemarker in the acquisition of English, but also for some observations inother studies relevant to the State-Process Distinction. As pointed outearlier, Li (1989) found that Mandarin-speaking children incorrectlyused the progressive marker zai with stative posture verbs. This
overgeneralization of zai can be accounted for if we take the prototypeapproach. According to prototype theory, although initially the use ofthe progressive marker is limited to the prototype (i.e., -ing used withactivity verbs), it should gradually be extended to less prototypicalcases. In extending the progressive marker, the child will be guided bythe principle of similarity to the prototype. As Li (1989) points out,posture verbs (sit, stand) are less prototypical stative verbs. In fact, theyare conceptually very close to activity verbs, as is exemplified by thefact that they are activity rather than state in English in the presentclassification.I5 This explains why the children in Li’s study, who wereexpanding the semantic boundary of the progressive, applied the
progressive marker zai to marginal stative verbs in Mandarin (i.e.,posture verbs). Presumably, they may resist overgeneralizing zai tomore typical stative verbs although they may be ready to use zai withposture verbs, which are closer in semantic content to activity verbs.This is an interesting hypothesis, and can be tested in future research.
In conclusion, this study presents additional acquisition data
concerning the State-Process Distinction as a hypothesized universal,and proposes an alternative account to the innateness account putforward by Bickerton (1981). Although this does not exclude the
possibility that some kind of innate factors are at work, the accountproposed here is a viable alternative that makes as much sense as, or
[ 15] He stands/sits there involves habituality; therefore stand/sit was mostly classifiedas activity rather than state in this study.
81
even more sense than, the innateness account in that it is more
congruent with the findings in this study, which demonstrates a clearassociation between the characteristics of maternal speech and that ofthe child.
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