Editing Kannada (section)

== Significance to Modern Linguistics ==
While an early account of Kannada's grammar is available in ''[[Shabdamanidarpana]],'' it has played a central role in the modern linguistics thanks to its unique semantic and syntactic properties that have been significant to studies of language [[Language acquisition|acquisition]] and [[Innateness hypothesis|innateness]]. [[Jeffrey Lidz|Jeff Lidz]] is a significant Western linguist to have studied Kannada. His investigations found at least two properties of Kannada to be very impactful in developing contemporary understandings of language acquisition. The first observation was that Kannada has a [[causative]] [[morpheme]] (like -''ify'' for English, in ''personify'' or ''deify''), which appears whenever a verb with causative meaning is expressed.<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal |last1=Gleitman |first1=Lila R. |last2=Liberman |first2=Mark Y. |last3=McLemore |first3=Cynthia A. |last4=Partee |first4=Barbara H. |date=2019-01-14 |title=The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (and How They Do It) |url=https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-011640 |journal=Annual Review of Linguistics |language=en |volume=5 |issue= |pages=1–24 |doi=10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-011640 |issn=2333-9683}}</ref> This was significant, because it allowed him to test whether an observation of English-learning infants, that they worked out novel verb meanings based on the number of overt [[Noun phrase|NPs]] they took, applied cross-linguistically. Given that the presence of the aforementioned causative morpheme would be a more obvious and reliable indicator for differentiating meanings, Kannada was a perfect language to test this observation; Lidz et al. (2003) found that Kannada-learning infants relied ''more heavily'' on the number of overt NPs than the presence of the causative morpheme.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Lidz |first1=Jeffrey |last2=Gleitman |first2=Henry |last3=Gleitman |first3=Lila |date=2003-04-01 |title=Understanding how input matters: verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar |url=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010027702002305 |journal=Cognition |volume=87 |issue=3 |pages=151–178 |doi=10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00230-5 |pmid=12684198 |issn=0010-0277}}</ref> This has been used by [[Generative grammar|generativists]] and [[Universal grammar|UG]] [[Psychological nativism|nativists]] to argue that verb meaning acquisition based on [[syntactic bootstrapping]] is [[Linguistic universal|language universal]] and innate.<ref name=":1" /> 

The second property of major significance to develops in modern linguistic understandings lies in the fact that in Kannada negation comes at the end of the sentence and the quantified object linearly precedes it. This means there is no capacity for  confounding linear order and hierarchical relations, as there is in English. This can be used to test whether the observation for English-speaking infants of considering [[Hierarchical organization|hierarchical organisation]] more than [[Linear order (linguistics)|linear order]] when deciding [[Scope (formal semantics)|scope ambiguity]] is cross-linguistic, or just a product of English's confounded linear order. Specifically, analysing the sentence "I didn't read two books" (in Kannada), if what matters is linear order, Kannada speaking children's preferred interpretation would be one where 'two books' has wider scope than negation (i.e., there are two books I did not read), and if what matters is hierarchical organisation, their preferred interpretation would be the opposite (i.e., that it is not the case that I read two books). [[Jeffrey Lidz|Lidz]] and Musolino (2002) found that they prefer the second, hierarchical interpretation, just like English-speaking children.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Lidz |first1=Jeffrey |last2=Musolino |first2=Julien |date=2002-06-01 |title=Children's command of quantification |url=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010027702000136 |journal=Cognition |volume=84 |issue=2 |pages=113–154 |doi=10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00013-6 |pmid=12175570 |issn=0010-0277}}</ref> This has been used to argue that infants universally represent sentences not as mere strings of adjacent words, but as hierarchical objects, a regular talking point among [[Generative grammar|Chomskyans]] and nativists.<ref name=":1" />