From states to events: The acquisition of English passive participles*

In this paper we examine the development of passive participles in the spontaneous speech of seven English speaking children. We argue that the grammatical properties which distinguish passive participles as a category emerge gradually and are learned as motivated properties of a complex, polysemous construction. The data reveals a regular progression from early adjectival uses to true verbal passives, in which the participle itself denotes a dynamic event. This process follows a consistent pattern, whereby children gradually extend the use of participles to equivocal contexts that are compatible with either a stative or an eventive reading. All seven children regularly use participles in equivocal contexts before they begin to master true verbal passives. This development is analyzed as an instance of constructional grounding, a process whereby certain uses of a relatively simple source construction provide the basis for children’s initial hypotheses about a more diAcult target construction. More generally, the gradual progression from adjectival to verbal passives suggests how syntactic categories and grammatical constructions can be learned gradually on the basis of earlier, simpler structures.