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UNIVERSALS IN RELATIVE CLAUSE ACQUISITION: EVIDENCE FROM CHILD AND ADULT L1 AND L2 LEARNERS OF HINDI-URDU Lynne Hansen Brigham Young University - Hawaii Campus In the search for universals of relative clause acquisition, the present research investigated the comprehension of six types of Hindi-Urdu correlative sentences by child and adult LI and L2 learners. Group comparisons show a sharper distinction between the performance of the first and second language learners than between the children and adults. While the native speakers tend to pay attention to case markers in interpreting sentences, the English-speaking learners tend to ignore these morphological cues, relying rather on a word order heuristic. The LI errors, particularly those of the adults, are more systematic than the L2. Many of the learners do not appear to have any functional strategy for discovering the missing noun complement in the Hindi-Urdu correlative clauses and instead resort to random guessing. The paper concludes that language universals are available for the processing of complex structures only once a certain level of proficiency has been attained. The existence of universal processes that underlie language development has been widely accepted by researchers in first language acquisition (Brown 1973). The assumption is that in the languages of the world the possible grammars are limited by an innately determined set of schemata that result from the biological composition of the human mind. As part of a child’s genetic endowment, these schemata make available a predetermined set of principles that restrict the nature of hypotheses made about the organization of a language. In second language acquisition research over the past decade, the role of universals in acquisition has also been an area of central interest. Some researchers argue that there is no reason to assume that universal schemata and principles operate any differently in the learning of a second language than they do in the first (Dulay and Burt 1975). First language influence in L2 learning is claimed to be minimal, or even non- existent. At the same time, the learning strategies of the second language learner are seen as being guided by universal principles common to all learners regardless of first language background. This position has gained some credence as a result of several studies that report little L1 interference in the speech and comprehension of 143

UNIVERSALS IN RELATIVE CLAUSE ACQUISITION: EVIDENCE FROM CHILD AND ADULT L1 AND L2 LEARNERS OF HINDI-URDU

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UNIVERSALS IN RELATIVE CLAUSE ACQUISITION: EVIDENCE FROM CHILD AND ADULT L1 AND L2

LEARNERS OF HINDI-URDU

Lynne Hansen Brigham Young University - Hawaii Campus

In the search for universals of relative clause acquisition, the present research investigated the comprehension of six types of Hindi-Urdu correlative sentences by child and adult L I and L2 learners. Group comparisons show a sharper distinction between the performance of the first and second language learners than between the children and adults. While the native speakers tend to pay attention to case markers in interpreting sentences, the English-speaking learners tend to ignore these morphological cues, relying rather on a word order heuristic. The LI errors, particularly those of the adults, are more systematic than the L2. Many of the learners do not appear to have any functional strategy for discovering the missing noun complement in the Hindi-Urdu correlative clauses and instead resort to random guessing. The paper concludes that language universals are available for the processing of complex structures only once a certain level of proficiency has been attained.

The existence of universal processes that underlie language development has been widely accepted by researchers in first language acquisition (Brown 1973). The assumption is that in the languages of the world the possible grammars are limited by an innately determined set of schemata that result from the biological composition of the human mind. As part of a child’s genetic endowment, these schemata make available a predetermined set of principles that restrict the nature of hypotheses made about the organization of a language.

In second language acquisition research over the past decade, the role of universals in acquisition has also been an area of central interest. Some researchers argue that there is no reason to assume that universal schemata and principles operate any differently in the learning of a second language than they do in the first (Dulay and Burt 1975). First language influence in L2 learning is claimed to be minimal, or even non- existent. At the same time, the learning strategies of the second language learner are seen as being guided by universal principles common to all learners regardless of first language background.

This position has gained some credence as a result of several studies that report little L1 interference in the speech and comprehension of

143

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144 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2

second language learners (Ervin-Tripp 1974, Milon 1974, Hansen-Bede 1975). Further support for the view of minimal first language influence in L2 comes from studies which report that the speech of L1 children and L2 adults contain similar types of errors (Cook 1973, Bailey et al. 1974). Other research, however, provides convincing evidence of L 1 influences in the interlanguages of children as well as adults (Hakuta 1976, Hansen 1982, Schumann 1979, Wode 1976).

Progress in the resolution of issues related to the nature and amount of first language influence in second language acquisition and to the operation of universal language learning principles will require the identification of specific principles and the examination of their applications in the developing linguistic systems of first and second language learners. The present study undertakes such research in an analysis of strategies used by L1 and L2 children and adults in the comprehension of Hindi-Urdu relative clause constructions.

UNIVERSALS IN RELATIVE CLAUSE ACQUISITION

A number of investigators have explored how different kinds of sentences containing relative clauses are processed by children learning English as a first language (Brown 1971, de Villiers et al. 1979, Sheldon 1974, Tavakolian 1981) and by adults as a second language (Schachter 1974, Ioup and Kruse 1977, Sheldon 1977a, Gass 1978 and 1979, Tarallo and Myhill 1983). Out of the tangled web of conflicting findings and alternative interpretations contained in the literature, two types of universal strategies have been suggested as operative in the processing of relativized constructions: 1) those based on grammatical relations alone (Keenan and Comrie 1977, Comrie and Keenan 1979, Sheldon 1974), and 2) those that take into account surface features, like word order (Bever 1970, Tavakolian 1981).

From their study of relative clause constructions in a wide range of languages, Keenan and Comrie (1977) have proposed a universal hierarchy of grammatical relations out of which relativization can take place. Labeled the Accessibility Hierarchy (AH), its ordering is: - SU > _I DO > JO- > -I OBL > -I GEN > 0-P Subject Direcr Indirect Oblique Genitive Object of a

Object Object Complement

If in a given language, a relative clause can be formed with the relativizable noun phrase in some grammatical relation, then relative

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clauses can also be formed with the coreferential noun phrase bearing any grammatical relation listed to the left of that particular relation on the hierarchy. For example, if a language can form relative clauses in which the coreferential noun phrase of the restricting sentence is an object of a complement, then it can also form relative clauses on all of the other positions on the hierarchy since they are all to the left of it. Thus, we see that cross-linguistically the most relativizable position, the one upon which all languages can relativize, is the subject, with each step to the right of it on the hierarchy representing a more infrequent (in the languages of the world) position for relativization.

I t has further been suggested (Gass 1978) that the more accessible relative clauses will be perceived as more natural and hence will be easier to process and learn. Thus relative clauses formed on subjects will be easier than those formed on direct objects, and these will both be easier than those formed on indirect objects, and so on down the hierarchy.

Support for this hypothesis is extant in the acquisition literature. De Villiers et al. (1979) report that English sentences involving a head noun in subject role are easier for L1 children to comprehend than those in which the head noun is an object, and both these are easier than those sentences in which the head noun is an indirect object. Similarly, for adult L2 learners of English, Gass (1978) found that the ease or difficulty of relativization on a given position corresponds to the AH, and that the particular structure of a learner’s first language does not significantly affect this difficulty order. The one apparent exception to the order predicted by AH for English, the genitive position, was interpreted as evidence that in spite of a strong tendency toward the acquisition sequence predicted by the AH, the order may be modified slightly by certain intralingual features of a particular language.

A second proposed universal based on grammatical relations is the parallel function hypothesis proposed by Sheldon (1974). In her study of the comprehension of English relative constructions by pre-school children she classified relative clause sentences into four types, SS, SO, OS, and 00, along. the following two dimensions: 1) ,whether the head N P functions as S or 0 in the main clause, and 2) whether the coreferential NP in the relative clause functions as S or 0 in the relative clause. In accounting for her finding that the children’s comprehension of SS and 00 type sentences tended to be much higher than that of SO and OS, Sheldon argues that in a complex sentence, if coreferential NPs have the same grammatical function in their respective clauses, then the

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sentence will be easier to process than one in which the coreferential NPs have different grammatical functions.

Although some replication studies do approximate Sheldon’s findings for English (Ervin-Tripp 1974, Tavakolian 1981), others do not (de Villiers et al. 1979, Smith 1974), and evidence from the acquisition of structurally diverse languages appears to disconfirm parallel function as a universal processing heuristic (Hakuta 1977 (Japanese), Aller 1977 (Arabic).

The word order strategy proposed by Bever (1970), however, does find convincing support in the relative clause literature. Based on surface structure word order rather than opaque grammatical relations, this NVN hypothesis is specific to the canonical sentence schema of a particular language. For Hindi-Urdu, an SOV language, it predicts that any sequence of NNV corresponding to Subject-Object-Verb will be easier to process than the same sequence when it corresponds to other grammatical relations. In a careful study of English relative clause comprehension, de Villiers et al. (1979) provide evidence for the operation of such a strategy. They report that children’s early interpretations of sentences containing relative clauses do reflect their efforts to parse received strings into NVN sequences that can be construed as containing Subject-Verb-Object relations (the English canonical order). This NVN strategy facilitates accurate interpretation of sentences like The lion hit the camel thatpushed the horse (N1 - V1 - N2 - V2 - N3) where N2 is the object of V1 as well as the subject of V2.

The hypotheses discussed here assume that the acquisition of sentences containing relative clauses is governed by universal principles and that there will be commonalities in development for various learners across languages. Such hypotheses can be put to the test through acquisition studies involving structurally diverse languages such as the present investigation of the comprehension of Hindi-Urdu by natives and by L1 English speakers.

HINDI-URDU RELATIVE CLAUSE

In Hindi-Urdu the relative clause can follow the modified noun or it can precede or follow the main clause. This freedom of movement necessitates a constraint which requires that the noun shared by the main and the relative clauses must occur in whichever of the two clauses occurs first in the surface structure. The shared NP in the second clause is then deleted, and only a pronoun appears there. In all of the sentences used in

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Hansen 147

the present study (see Appendix for examples), the relative marker, j o , is attached to the left of the relativized noun which is retained in the first clause. In the second clause the third person pronoun, vo, appears as a correlative pronoun representing the shared noun.

In each of the six Hindi-Urdu sentence types used in the present study (see Appendix), both relative and correlative clauses are transitive, i.e., consisting of a Subject, an Object and a Verb. The sentence types are classified along two dimensions: 1) whether the relative NP functions as Subject or Object in the relative jo-clause (the first clause in the surface structure), and 2) whether the deleted N P functions as Subject or Object in the correlative vo-clause (the second clause). A comparison of Hindi- Urdu and English word orders, with relative clauses contained in parentheses, is provided in Table 1. Center embeddings, such as those that occur in the SS and SO English sentence types, do not occur in the Hindi-Urdu constructions used in this study. Deviations in the relative clause from the SOV Hindi-Urdu canonical order is seen in the 0s’ and 00’ sentences that invert the Subject and Object in the first clause of the unmarked 0s and 00 word orders.

The Hindi-Urdu sentences differ from the English in terms of the morphological cues provided. In the Indic language these cues alone provide sufficient information for the correct assignment of function to the correlativized Noun Phrase. Not only do both the relative and correlative pronouns assume the features of case in their respective nouns (jo and vo are in the nominative case, jys and us in the oblique) but, in addition, an object marker -ko is attached to the Object Noun Phrase in each clause.

The present study compares the performance of L1 and L2 children and adults in the comprehension of the Hindi-Urdu correlative constructions.

Table I Word Orders of the Hindi-Urdu Test Sentences

and English Relative Clause Sentences

Hindi-Urdu English ss (SOV) ov S(V0) vo so (SOV) sv svo (VO) 0s (SOV) ov S(SV) vo 0 s ’ (OSV) ov S(SV) vo 00 (SOV) sv svo (SV) 00‘ (OSV) sv svo (SV)

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148 Language Learning Vof. 36, No. 2

METHOD

SUBJECTS

The 48 English-speaking children in the present study ranged in age from four to nine. The time they had spent in India varied from six months to three years. They were students of English-medium schools in New Delhi or in Mussoorie and some attended a Hindi class in their school for three hours a week. Most of their exposure to the language, however, was in a natural milieu, though the quality and amount of this exposure varied considerably across the children. While some of them spent vacation periods with their missionary parents in acquisition-rich environments in Hindi-speaking villages, others had far fewer opportunities to receive target language input.

The exposure of the 15 adult second language learners to Hindi-Urdu was limited primarily to the classroom and language laboratory. These L1 English speakers were enrolled in beginning, intermediate and advanced levels of the Hindi program at the University of Hawaii, and had studied the language for periods ranging from six months to four years. Only three of them had spent any time in a Hindi-Urdu speaking area.

The L1 subjects were all Indian. The 83 children, ranging in age from five to eleven, were tested in primary schools in Mussoorie. The 15 adults were faculty members at Indian universities or on the staff of the Central Institute of Hindi in Hyderabad. All held advanced degrees in Hindi or related fields. Although a few of the Central Institute people did not count Hindi as home language, all reported having used it extensively since childhood.

MATERIALS AND PROCEDURE

Two sets of 12 sentences were prepared, each set containing two of each of six sentence types (see Appendix) presented in a randomized order. To test for comprehension, following Sheldon’s (1974) procedure, subjects were required to act out the sentences using model animals. Each subject was tested individually. The experimenter first made certain that the subject was familiar with the animal names (bull, camel, cheetah, elephant, horse and lion) and the verbs (bite, hit and push). The task was explained and two sample sentences presented to be sure that

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Hansen 149

the procedure was understood. The twelve test sentences immediately followed, with the examiner recording the responses in a notebook.

RESULTS

OUTCOME

The results of the experiment are shown in the graph in Figure 1. An initial observation is that overall, the percentages of correct interpretation are surprisingly low. In English, a general mastery of relative clause constructions is reported by the ninth year (Sheldon 1977b). For Hindi-Urdu, however, these data indicate that natives continue to experience some difficulty in relative clause comprehension into adulthood.

This late acquisition may be related in part to the infrequency of the

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Child I I

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1.50 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2

constructions in the Hindi-Urdu input to learners. In our sizeable corpus of L2 data, relative clauses are infrequent in the Hindi-Urdu directed to the children, and rare in the speech of the L2 children themselves. One apparent reason for this is that other constructions are available in the language to circumvent their use. An example is the -wala construction which was supplied most frequently in response to the author’s attempts to elicit relative constructions from L1 and L2 children. The adjectival element -wala, (-wali, -wale) is added to a noun or to the oblique infinitive form of the verb, so that you have for example, phalwala (fruit wala) ‘the one who sells fruit’ or ganewala (singing wala) ‘the one who is singing’.

Figure 1 shows clearly that for all sentence types the comprehension of the L l adults surpasses that of the other groups. One-way ANOVAs between the groups for each sentence type indicates this difference to be significant at the 0.001 level. This is not surprising, of course, since the overall Hindi-Urdu competence of the native adults is far greater than that of the other subjects in the study, especially the L2 learners. Such enormous differences in target language exposure and proficiency between subject groups clearly needs to be considered in the interpretation of data in comparison studies, and some of the problems involved in the search for universals in data from such diverse groups will be addressed in the final section of the paper.

In addressing the questions posed in the present research, a comparison of accuracy orders of the six relative clause types is given in Table 2. Here we see that the orders of the L1 groups reflect that predicted by the AH, (that is the SS and SO sentence types are easier than the OS, OS’, 00 and 00‘), while the orders of the L2 groups do not.

A further distinction between the comprehension patterns of the native speakers and the second language learners is seen in a comparison of their performance on 0s and 00 sentence types as opposed to 0s’ and 00‘. If subjects rely on an NNV = SOV word order heuristic for their interpretations, then misinterpretations of the first clause of 0s’ and 00’ sentences would result. If attention is given to the morphological cues, however, performance on 0s and 0s’ as well as on 00 and 00’ sentences would be similar. In Table 2 we see that the latter is the case for the L1 adults and children whose data show no statistical significance between differences in performance on 0 s and 00 sentence types as opposed to 0s’ and 00’. The second language learners, on the other hand, find the 0s and 00 sentence types easier than the 0s’ and 00’.

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Table 2 Orders of Comprehension Accuracy for the Four Groups

L1 Adults ss > > so > 0s - 0s’ > 00‘ > 00 L1 Children so > > ss > 0s > 0s’ > 00’ > 00 L2 Adults ss > 0s > > so - 0s’ > 00 > 00’ L2 Children oo> ss > so > > OO’> 0s > 0s‘

SS > SO means that SS elicited more correct responses than SO.

SS > > SO means that SS elicited significantly more responses than SO, as measured by T-tests.

For the L2 adults the interpretation of the 0s sentences was significantly higher than the 0s’ and the interpretation of the 00 was slightly higher than the 00’. For the L2 children the interpretation of the 00 sentences was significantly higher than the 00 while the interpretation of the 0s was slightly higher than 0s‘ (though the performance on 0s and 0s’ were both near the level of chance).

While a summary of correct responses (Figure 1) or an ordering of sentence types based on the percentages of correct interpretions (Table 2) is useful in establishing relative ease of comprehension of the constructions for the groups examined, the L 1-L2 and child-adult differences in sentence processing can be seen with greater clarity in a more detailed analysis of the data.

ERROR ANALYSIS

Table 3 shows the distribution of responses for each of the subject groups. The coding system is adapted from Sheldon (1974). The coded responses refer to the occurrence of the NP in the linear order of the sentence. The number 1 refers to the first NP in the string, number 2 to the second, and number 3 to the third. Each sentence contains two double-number sequences. The first two numbers indicate the noun phrase functioning as subject and object of the first verb, and the second two numbers indicate the noun phrases functioning as subject and object of the second verb. For example, 12,23 is the correct response for the following 0s relative clause: The horse pushes the lion that hits the camel. The coding indicates that the first NP, the horse, is the subject of the first verb, pushes, and that the second NP, the lion, is the subject of

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Table 3 Percentage of Responses by Group f o r the Most Frequent Response Types

Response Subject Category Group

12,13 Al C l A2 c 2

12,31

12.23

12,32

21,13

21,31

21,32

A1 CI A2 c 2

A1 c1 A2 c 2

Al CI A2 c 2

A1 c1 A2 c 2

A1 CI A2 c 2

Al c1 A2 c2

21,23 A1 CI A2 c 2

21,12 A1 c1 A2 c 2

ss so Relative Clause Types

-

9 7

11

0s 00 0s' 00'

4 5

43 23

- 4 7 5

-

7 7 5

-

8

18 -

29 21 14 19

4 10

5 -

9

15 -

-

-

-

[ 15

36 43 12 12

-

-

-

-

-

7 7

24

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Hansen 153

the verb hits in the second clause, and that the third NP, the camel, is the object of hit.

On Table 3, only those response categories that account for at least five percent of the responses for at least one of the sentence types were included. The correct solutions for each of the six correlative constructions are enclosed in boxes on the table.

The error analysis reveals that the group differences noted above in performance on 0s and 00 sentence types as opposed to 0s‘ and 00’ is indeed due to differences in processing strategies between the L1 and L2 speakers. In the interpretations of 0s’ relative clauses the L2 adults and children were significantly more likely to incorrectly invert the OSV order in their interpretations (on 57 percent and 51 percent of their 0s’ responses, respectively) than were the L1 adults and children (on 4 percent and 27 percent of their responses). The same was true for the 00’ relative clauses that were also more likely to be inverted by the L2 adults and children (on 59 percent and 48 percent of the 00’ test items) than by the native adults and children (on 4 percent and 28 percent of the items). Thus we see the reliance of the second language learners on an NNV = SOV ordering heuristic, as predicted by Bever’s (1970) word order hypothesis. Word order takes precedence as the English speakers ignore the abundant morphological cues.

The native speakers, on the other hand, pay much more attention to features of morphology. For some of the adults, in fact, the search for the morphological markers is apparently a conscious process. Following the testing of the linguistically sophisticated Hindi speakers, several pointed out that some of the sentences (particularly the 00 and 00’ types) had seemed ambiguous. Clarification could come, they suggested, through the addition of the emphatic particle -hi to the correlative, i.e., jys hathi-ko unT chura hay. us-hi-ko Ser marta hay. This highlights the placement of -ko (the object marker) following us (the correlative pronoun) and thus apparently marks more clearly the function of the missing noun complement.

The processing of the Hindi-Urdu relativized constructions appears to be a left-to-right enterprise, with generally high comprehension of the initial NNV sequence (except the L2 comprehension of the OSV word order for the 0s’ and 00’ sentence types). After interpreting the first clause, the difficulty then arises in finding the absent noun complement in the second. The problem is to match the vo (or jys-N-ko) of the correlative clause with the jo-N (or jys-N-ko) of the relative clause.

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In approaching this problem, the strategies that lead the Ll adults into error are quite uniform. Their average number of response categories per sentence type is only 1.5, significantly fewer than those of the L1 children (4.0), the L2 adults (4.3) and the L2 children (4.6).

As previously noted, the native adults differ from the other groups in their greater length of exposure to the target language and high level of competence in its use. There is an enormous contrast between the Hindi- Urdu proficiency of these highly educated Indians and that of the English speaking learners in this study. Some of the L2 subjects had been exposed to the target language for only a few hours a week for durations as short as six months and may never even have heard a Hindi-Urdu correlative construction. These less proficient speakers tend to vary to a greater extent in their responses on the relative clause test, indicating less application of systematic comprehension strategies. In the absence of functional strategies for interpreting correlative sentences, they appear to frequently resort to random guessing in their search for a missing noun complement. This finding suggests that when a processing task greatly exceeds the linguistic resources of the learner, a systematic strategy for dealing with it may not be applied. Thus clear evidence would not be found for universal language learning strategies.

As in previous research, the L1 data in the present study bzar out the predictions of the AH, with higher comprehension for the correlatives constructed upon Subjects (SS and SO) than for those constructed upon Objects (OS, OS’, 00, 00’). The absence in the L2 data of similar evidence for the AH could be accounted for by the ‘guessing’ phenomenon, the tendency among those subjects with little exposure to the language to respond to the relative clause comprehension task by just guessing the missing noun complement rather than by applying a strategy that would reflect universal language learning principles.

This is interesting in light of recent discussion concerning which language learner can best provide a window on universals of acquisition. Gass and Ard (1980) argue that, contrary to a widely-held belief that universals are most easily to be discovered in the data from L1 children, it is, rather, the adult second language learner, older and unaffected by developmental cognitive considerations, who can give a clearer view of universal processes. The error analysis in the present study suggests that for the acquisition of infrequent or difficult structures, such as correlative constructions in Hindi-Urdu, it is the data from native adults that reveal the most about universals in language learning. Universal

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processing strategies will be used consistently in the comprehension of such advanced structures only when a learner already has a certain prerequisite knowledge of the target language.

In sum, Hindi-Urdu correlative constructions are acquired relatively late by both L1 and L2 learners. In the interpretations of the first clause, group differences are found between first and second language comprehension strategies. The English speakers whose first language lacks a rich case marking system tend to ignore the case markers in their second language, relying instead on an NNV = SOV word order heuristic. The Hindi-Urdu native speakers, on the other hand, do pay attention to the morphological cues, interpreting the OSV relative clauses with the same facility as the SOV.

On the interpretation of the second clause of the test sentences, the L1 adults use more systematic strategies than the other groups. Many of the less proficient speakers among the L1 children and L2 learners, in the absence of a functional strategy, resort to random guessing of the missing noun and its function in the correlative clause. Thus, their errors may reveal less about universal strategies used in the process of Hindi- Urdu correlative constructions than do the errors of the L1 adults which unambiguously reflect the order of difficulty predicted by Keenan and Comrie’s (1 977) accessibility hierarchy. For complex linguistic structures which are learned late, the application of universal processing strategies to a comprehension task depends on a prerequisite level of competence in the language.

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Page 16: UNIVERSALS IN RELATIVE CLAUSE ACQUISITION: EVIDENCE FROM CHILD AND ADULT L1 AND L2 LEARNERS OF HINDI-URDU

APP

EN

DIX

H

indi

-Urd

u R

elat

ive

Sent

ence

Typ

es

2 S (S

' 0

V)

io

ier

haat

hii-

ko

dhak

elta

a- ha

i [S

21

0

V

vo

ghoR

e-ko

m

aart

aa- h

ai

(cor

rela

tive)

~

__

_

hors

e-(o

bjec

t m

arke

r)

~ hits

(r

elat

ive)

lio

n el

epha

nt-(

obje

ct

~~ m

arke

r)

push

es

Th

en

that

push

es t

he e

leph

ant

hits

the

hor

se.

2 0

(S'

0

V)

io

Ser

haat

hii-k

o dh

akel

taa-

hai

[021

S V

us

-ko

ghoR

aa

maa

rtaa

-hai

(c

orre

lativ

e)-(

obje

ct m

arke

r) -~

ho

rse

hits

(r

elat

ive)

lio

n el

epha

nt-(

obje

ct m

arke

r)

push

es

Th

er

se

hits

the

lio

n th

at p

ushe

s th

e el

epha

nt.

2 S 0

' Se

r iis

ha

athi

i-ko

dh

akel

taa-

hai

(S

[S21

0

V

vo

ghoR

e-ko

m

aart

aa-h

ai

(cor

rela

tive)

ho

rse-

(obj

ect

mar

ker)

~ hi

ts

lion

(rel

ativ

e)

elep

hant

-(ob

ject

mar

ker)

pu

shes

Th

e e

lem

tha

t th

e lio

n pu

shes

hits

the

hor

se.

2 S S

V

haat

hii-

ko

Ser

dhak

elta

a- ha

i (0

' iis

[S

21

0

V

vo

ghoR

e-ko

m

aart

aa-h

ai

(cor

rela

tive)

ho

rse-

(obj

ect m

arke

r) -

hits

(r

elat

ive)

el

epha

nt-(

obje

ct m

arke

r) ~

-

lion

push

es

The

ele

phan

t th

at t

he l

ion

push

es h

its t

he h

orse

.

(1) 0

2 0

(S

0'

V

ser

iis

haat

hii-

ko

dhak

elta

a-ha

i [0

21

S V

us-k

o gh

oRaa

m

aart

aa- h

ai

(cor

rela

tive)

-(ob

ject

mar

ker)

_

__

~

hors

e hi

ts

lion

(rel

ativ

e)

elep

hant

-(ob

ject

mar

ker)

pu

shes

Th

e ho-s

the

elep

hant

tha

t th

e lio

n pu

shes

.

2 0

(0'

S V

iis

ha

athi

i-ko

se

r dh

akel

taa-

hai

[021

S V

us

-ko

ghoR

aa

maa

rtaa

-hai

(c

orre

lativ

e)-(

obje

ct m

arke

r) -~

ho

rse

hits

(r

elat

ive)

el

epha

nt-(

obje

ct m

arke

r)

~~ lio

n pu

shes

T

he h

orse

hits

the

ele

phan

t th

at t

he l

ion

push

es.