Demuth K
Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.
J Child Lang. 1990 Feb;17(1):67-84. doi: 10.1017/s0305000900013106.
Counter to findings in English, German and Hebrew, recent acquisition studies have shown that the passive is acquired early in several non-Indo-European languages. In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, this paper addresses certain typological phenomena which influence the early acquisition of passives in Sesotho, a southern Bantu language. After outlining the structure of the Sesotho passive and its syntactic and discourse functions, I examine Sesotho-speaking children's spontaneous use of passives, showing that the acquisition of passives in Sesotho is closely linked to the fact that Sesotho subjects must be discourse topics. I conclude that a detailed examination of how passive constructions interact with other components of a given linguistic system is critical for developing a coherent and universally applicable theory of how passives are acquired.
与英语、德语和希伯来语的研究结果相反，最近的习得研究表明，在几种非印欧语系语言中，被动语态是很早就被习得的。为了解释这一现象，本文探讨了某些类型学现象，这些现象影响了班图语系南部语言塞索托语中被动语态的早期习得。在概述了塞索托语被动语态的结构及其句法和语篇功能之后，我研究了说塞索托语的儿童对被动语态的自发使用，表明塞索托语中被动语态的习得与塞索托语主语必须是语篇话题这一事实密切相关。我得出结论，详细研究被动结构如何与特定语言系统的其他成分相互作用，对于构建一个连贯且普遍适用的被动语态习得理论至关重要。
