Arrernte children’s linguistic construction of motion events: Exploring the use of Associated Motion

Abstract

Introduction This study is a preliminary investigation of Eastern Arrernte children’s use (or non-use) of one interesting and complex area of Arrernte verbal morphology; the system of Associated Motion (AM). The work reported here emerges out of the first author’s more comprehensive study of children’s Arrernte at Ltyentye Apurte community in Central Australia, one location in the multi-site Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition (ACLA) research project directed by Jane Simpson and Gillian Wigglesworth. Informed by narratives elicited from 18 children and four adults, using a set of textless picture books (O’Shannessy 2004), this study is motivated by a language maintenance perspective, i.e. Arrernte families’ aspiration for their language to remain strong into the future. It contributes some specific insights into a general concern held by Arrernte educators that children’s Arrernte is missing some of the complexities of their mother tongue. Cross-linguistic typological and descriptive work on AM is more common than research on AM acquisition. Thus, this chapter offers a rare exploration of children’s use of the AM system in their first language (L1). The significance of the study also lies in links found between the diachronic development of AM – as proposed by Simpson (2001, 2004) and Koch (2020, 2021) – and synchronic L1 acquisition of elements of the system. This study will show that, as a cohort, the children are maintaining at least a subset of the core morphemes in the AM system that are used by adults, and are preserving key distinctions in the system. However, some children are not yet showing an adult-like alignment of semantics and grammar for clauses containing AM-marked verbs. Also, for one of the AM morphemes used by the adults, we find that the children use an alternative structure (a motion with purpose construction). In this deviation from adult patterns, we see echoes of the construction proposed as the precursor to the development of AM prior motion forms.