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 overtly marked as referring to a specific entity or a nonspecific entity, while in other languages there are other syntactic effects of specificity. For example in Dutch, nouns (which are not marked overtly for specificity) move leftward when the noun is specific (this movement is known as scrambling) but not when the noun is non-specific. In Russian, a specific noun occurs preverbally irrespective of whether it is the subject or object, while a non-specific noun occurs postverbally. Thus, while the specificity of a noun may not be overtly marked on the noun itself, there are various effects of specificity that can be seen in the syntax. The question that has been posed in the literature is how do children acquire this property of language, and how early do they show this knowledge. Various authors have made contrasting claims regarding specificity in child language. For example, Schaeffer (2000), based on evidence from child Dutch in which children fail to scramble in obligatory context, claims that the nominal feature specificity is optionally underspecified in child grammar (on par with the underspecification of temporal specificity, as proposed by Hyams, 1996). Avrutin & Brun (2001), on the other hand, show that Russian children place arguments either preverbally or postverbally appropriately according to their specificity, thus showing intact knowledge of specificity at very early ages. They argue that any errors that arise do so because of unadult-like pragmatic knowledge of what constitutes a specific referent.