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Ellipsis in Warlpiri children's narratives: an analysis of frog stories

Abstract The paper reports on developmental aspects of the ellipsis of core lexical arguments in Warlpiri children's narratives. The children, aged from four to ten years, each told a frog story based on Mayer's Frog, Where Are You? (1969). Stories from six adults were used for comparison. Warlpiri allows ellipsis of lexical subject and object and employs bound pronominals (clitics) to register the number and person of subject and object, although third person forms are zero. Analysis of the stories showed a high percentage of null arguments in the youngest children's stories. The lowest percentage of null lexical arguments was from the seven to eight-year-olds. The older children showed greater flexibility in the ellipsis or overt expression of lexical arguments. Overall, the stories showed no bias toward ellipsis of subject or object; for two-argument verbs, subject and object are equally likely to be null, but more subjects were null in same-subject contexts than in switch-subject contexts. No differences were noted with patterns of lexical ellipsis in sentences with overt or zero bound pronominals. The findings are discussed in relation to Karmiloff-Smith's arguments for a three-phase developmental pattern in narrative organization.