Özet:

This paper presents a general review of literature in terms of acquisition of passives as well as providing new theoretical insights considering the semantics and pragmatics of passives, which are thought to be the underlying reasons of difficulty. There is a disagreement in the literature as to whether passive structures are difficult and if so, what may be the underlying causes of this difficulty. Based on the arguments presented in the literature, the syntactic hypothesis (Wexler 2004) and the incremental processing hypothesis (Trueswell and Gleitman 2004) stand out. Wexler’s syntactic hypothesis is that children regard all vP’s and CP’s as strong phases, which makes non-grammatical passives for them, which is the source of the difficulty. In the meantime, in both cases (syntax or incremental processing), frequency plays a major role in boosting the acquisition process by either making children be faster at reassigning thematic roles, which is the source of difficulty according to incremental processing hypothesis, or making children be aware of the fact that vPs are not strong phases, thereby making passives grammatical, so that children can use them. Finally, in this study, a theoretical analysis based on semantic and pragmatical perspectives is presented to explain why passive structures are difficult to acquire in some languages because the studies on passive structures in the literature neglect the meaning component. In this study, the introspective semantics model (Von Fintel and Heim 2011) was used to provide a new theoretical perspective on the acquisition of passive structures.  

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