Semantics and syntax tagging in Russian child corpus

Polina Eismont

pp. 215-224

in: Polina Eismont, Olga Mitrenina, Asya Pereltsvaig (eds), Language, music and computing, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

The paper describes a new semantic and syntax tagging that is applied to annotate Russian child corpus "KONDUIT" – the corpus of oral unprepared elicited narratives produced by Russian monolinguals at the age of 2;7–7;6. This annotation allows uncovering some links between verb semantics and syntax that influence the steps of verb acquisition. A case study of verbs of speech and their comparison to the ones of mental activity shows that children acquire verb semantic and syntax structures on the base of verb semantic classes gradually progressing from one structure to the next one. On the other hand the results prove that syntax acquisition depends not only on verb semantics but also on such parameters as reference or part of speech. Along with the acquisition of narrative skills and the rules of referencing children widen their sets of possible syntactic structures.