Object agreement and specificity in early Swahili

Object agreement and specificity in early Swahili.

Schaeffer (1997, 2000) argues that children lack knowledge of specificity because Dutch children omit determiners and fail to scramble pronouns. Avrutin and Brun (2001), however, find that Russian children place arguments correctly according to whether they are specific or non-specific. This paper investigates object agreement and specificity in early Swahili. Object agreement in Swahili is obl...

Object Agreement and Specificity in Swahili

The acquisition of abstract categories of language (such as tense, aspect and agreement among others) has commanded much of the attention of the field of language acquisition for many decades now. How early do children show knowledge of these abstract properties of language, and how do they acquire them? One such abstract property of language is nominal specificity. In some languages a noun is ...

Subject Agreement, Object Agreement and Specificity in Swahili

The Discourse Function of Object Marking in Swahili

1. Introduction The Swahili object marker (OM) is a verbal prefix that agrees with an object of the verb. In Swahili there is no semantic or lexical class of objects for which object marking is obligatory, nor is there any class for which it is impossible. The numerous earlier studies of the object marker have discovered no hard and fast rules for its distribution. Its usage has been found to c...

Object recognition: view-specificity and motion-specificity

This paper describes an experiment to distinguish between two theories of human visual object recognition. According to the view-specificity hypothesis, object recognition is based on particular learned views, whereas the motion-specificity hypothesis states that object recognition depends on particular directed view-sequences. Both hypotheses imply a degree of view-bias (i.e. recognition of a ...