The acquisition of Hungarian demonstratives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2024/15/0032/000657Keywords:
demonstratives, child language, exophoric, HungarianAbstract
This paper presents the results of a small corpus query and a production study exploring demonstrative use in child Hungarian. 13 children between the ages of 3;6 and 4;6 and 11 adults participated in a jigsaw puzzle completion task. We found a significant association between the relative distance of the referent from the speaker and demonstrative choice in both the target group and the adult control group. There is, nevertheless, a strong overall difference between the two groups: children use more distals than proximals, unlike adult controls, who reverse this pattern. We argue that Hungarian children may overuse the distal demonstrative because it serves as the default option in non-contrastive contexts, and is the unmarked form with grammaticalised, non-spatial functions.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
