Abstract:

Children learning English as their first language hear the preposition 'with' used in a variety of ways (that is, once they isolate it as a separate word). For example, one mother's speech directed to her 22 month old daughter included the following uses of 'with' in a 30 minute period (Manchester database, CHILDES archive, file anne02a): ``I'll come and write with you.'', ``What a horrible noise you're making with your teeth.'', ``We need something to give her a wash with, don't we ?'', ``Is she gonna go in the bath with her shoes on?'', and ``What shall we do with that?'' What hypotheses about the meaning of 'with' do children make? In this talk, I will present results of a corpus study of children's earliest uses of 'with'. I show that six children's first twenty uses of 'with' cover several categories of meaning --- instrument, accompaniment, attribute, accompanying condition, reference, etc. I argue that these results indicate that children treat 'with' as meaning something more general than instrument, accompaniment, attribute, etc.

I will then discuss the methods and findings of a comprehension study in which the child's task was to answer the question ``What is X VERBING with?'' for 12 different verbs and in looking at photographs of people using instruments to carry out actions on objects (e.g., a photograph of someone eating spaghetti with a fork). This study is based on work of Duchan and Lund (Journal of Child Language, 1979), in which they found that children sometimes answered the question ``What do you verb with?'' by naming the direct object (e.g., ``soup'', in answer to ``What do you eat with?''). I will show how my results support and extend their findings.

From comprehension, I will turn to production and give some preliminary results of an elicited production task in which children describe events with agents, patients, and instruments. At issue are the following questions: (1) Do children refer to the instrument in their descriptions? (2) When they refer to both the instrument and patient in the same utterance, what order do they use? (3) What forms do they use to mark the instrument? In addition to discussing each of these questions and the results of this ongoing study, I will play some of the actual non-conventional utterances that this task elicits, utterances that only rarely appear in transcribed corpora. I will conclude by describing a proposed experiment aimed at answering the question of whether accompaniment is sufficient, and instrumentality unnecessary, for the use of 'with' in child language.