The acquisition of transitivity alternations in Greek: Does frequency count?

The present paper reports on the results of a study investigating the role of frequency in the acquisition of transitivity alternations in Greek. Transitivity alternations may or may not involve changes in the morphological marking of Voice on the verb. Results of a sentence-picture-matching task with child L1 learners of Greek (age range: 2;11–5;11) and a group of adult controls, show a clear developmental pattern in the number of interpretations children and adults allow. The developing L1 grammar shows evidence for multiple ambiguities in the interpretation of NACT and ACT morphology on the same verb, while the adult data show more unambiguous interpretations as a result of pragmatic or encyclopaedic information attached to verb entries in the adult grammar. The child and adult data from the SPM task is further compared with frequency counts of the readings that some of these verbs exhibit in written corpora of Greek (ILSP corpus (formal register) and a Web-based corpus created via automatic searches on the Internet (informal register). Finally, a small-scale analysis of child-directed speech from Stephany's (1997) data in CHILDES shows the rarity of NACT-marked verbs in the adult input as well as the tendency of each verb used to occur with one reading only. Findings are used to evaluate a usage-based approach to acquisition of transitivity alternations.