Transitivity
Tracking who does what to whom in events is a crucial aspect of social interactions. The understanding of relationships between agents, patient, and the action is crucial in language, allowing humans to communicate about complex social interactions. How do children from different linguistic background acquire the structures in order to talk about these events?
As part of the NCCR Evolving Language, we try to answer this taking a cross-linguistic perspective. Focusing on the input by adults, we want to find out how children use lexical arguments to describe these.