Grammaticalization and First Language Acquisition: Crosslinguistic perspectives

194 Pages·2013·3.23 MB·English

by  Dominique Bassano

Grammaticalization and First Language Acquisition
Benjamins Current Topics
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Volume 50
Grammaticalization and First Language Acquisition. Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dominique Bassano and Maya Hickmann
These materials were previously published in Language, Interaction and Acquisition -
Langage, Interaction et Acquisition 2:1 (2011)
Grammaticalization
and First Language Acquisition
Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by
Dominique Bassano
Maya Hickmann
CNRS – Université Paris 8
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grammaticalization and first language acquisition : crosslinguistic perspectives / Edited
by Dominique Bassano and Maya Hickmann.
p. cm. (Benjamins Current Topics, issn 1874-0081 ; v. 50)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Language awareness in children. 2. Bilingualism in children. 3. Language acquisition-
-Age factors. 4. Language acquisition. 5. Children--Language. 6. Verbal ability
in children. 7. Language and languages--Study and teaching. 8. Grammar,
Comparative and general--Grammaticalization. I. Bassano, Dominique, editor
of compilation.
P118.3 2013
401’.93--dc23 2013014456
isbn 978 90 272 0269 7 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7189 1 (Eb)
© 2013 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction
Grammaticalization and first language acquisition: Crosslinguistic
perspectives 1
Dominique Bassano and Maya Hickmann
Articles
The study of early comprehension in language development: New
methods, findings and issues 13
Michèle Kail
The acquisition of nominal determiners in French and German: A cross-
linguistic perspective on the grammaticalization of nouns 37
Dominique Bassano, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Isabelle Maillochon
and Wolfgang U. Dressler
Exploring patterns of adaptation in child-directed speech during the
process of early grammaticalization in child language 61
Marijn van Dijk and Paul van Geert
Sonority, gender and the impact of suffix predictability on the acquisition
of German noun plurals 81
Sabine Laaha
The impact of typological factors in monolingual and bilingual first
language acquisition: Caused motion expressions in English and French 101
Anne-Katharina Harr and Helen Engemann
Developmental perspectives on the expression of motion in speech and
gesture: A comparison of French and English 129
Maya Hickmann, Henriëtte Hendriks and Marianne Gullberg
Language-specificity of motion event expressions in young Korean
children 157
Soonja Choi
Index 185

Introduction
Grammaticalization and first language
acquisition
Crosslinguistic perspectives
Dominique Bassano and Maya Hickmann
Grammaticalization is an essential dimension of children’s language acquisi-
tion. In its widest sense, the notion of ‘grammaticalization’ refers to the processes
whereby children construct the grammatical — morphological and syntactic —
constraints of their language. On the basis of previous phonological and lexical
acquisitions, grammaticalization allows language to become a communication
system that is gradually more complex and structured. Our understanding of how
grammaticalization processes begin during early developmental phases and how
they evolve later on is a fundamental challenge for theories of language acquisi-
tion as well as for their applications, for example in relation to language teaching
or language pathology.
During recent years, research focusing on grammaticalization in language ac-
quisition has considerably evolved through new theoretical perspectives, such as
functionalist approaches and theories known as ‘emergentist’ or ‘usage-based’ that
propose new conceptions of development in comparison to Universal Grammar.
The present volume of LIA shows the renewed interest generated by grammati-
calization in seven contributions dedicated to the acquisition of two central cat-
egories of linguistic systems, nouns and verbs, across different languages. It opens
with a state of the art concerning very young children’s early language comprehen-
sion, with particular attention to their syntactic capacities, and continues with a
set of papers presenting studies in spontaneous or experimentally elicited produc-
tions with young children (before age three) and during later phases. The first
three papers concern grammaticalization processes in relation to nouns, such as
the acquisition of determiners and of nominal morphology. The next three ex-
amine lexicalization and grammaticalization processes in the verb and the verbal
network within different utterance structures.
2 Dominique Bassano and Maya Hickmann
1. General themes
Two main themes at the heart of the most recent debates on language acquisition
cut across the different contributions.
The first theme, which is central to studies examining early phases of language
development, concerns the origins of grammar and the nature of acquisitional
processes. Is grammatical knowledge innate or constructed by the child? Is the
development of grammar autonomous and modular or does it interact with oth-
er linguistic and cognitive capacities? How can we best describe developmental
changes and account both for underlying continuity and behavioural disconti-
nuities, such as explosions or regressions? What is the role of linguistic input?
Answers to these questions are far from simple. Functionalist types of approaches
propose a conception that is more ‘epigenetic’ than Universal Grammar as well
as compatible with connectionist models and dynamic systems (Bassano 2007;
Bates et al. 2003; MacWhinney 1999; Tomasello 2009; van Geert 2008). They high-
light the fact that, although language is anchored in our biological endowment, its
emergence is based on general communicative and cognitive capacities that are
constructed during the child’s first year of life. Abstract linguistic categories are
not given to the child from the start but are gradually constructed on the basis of
linguistic experience with the environment as well as learning and processing ca-
pacities. The acquisition of grammar is thus a gradual and non-linear process that
is carried out in interaction with other components of linguistic competence, par-
ticularly phonology and the lexicon, and in interaction with variables in the input,
such as adults’ child-directed speech. The various contributions in this volume
show how these questions are now addressed through new research paradigms
concerning early comprehension and how systematic longitudinal studies of early
production shed a new light on them, particularly through the use of innovative
modelling techniques.
The second theme concerns variation in lexicalization and grammaticaliza-
tion processes on the basis of the insights provided by cross-linguistic perspec-
tives. Linguistic diversity has been observed at practically all levels of organization
across the existing 6000 to 8000 languages in the world and has become a fun-
damental given that has raised new questions concerning linguistic universals
(Evans & Levinson 2009). The impact of cross-linguistic variation on acquisition
processes is particularly notable in relation to grammatical development (Kail
2004; Slobin 1985–1997). One of the major challenges of the comparative per-
spective, which is present in almost all contributions of this volume, is to highlight
the respective role of general cognitive and linguistic (including typological) con-
straints in language acquisition. The typological contrast between Germanic and
Romance languages constitutes a privileged starting point for the study of both
Grammaticalization and first language acquisition 3
nouns and verbs. A growing number of studies about spatial representation across
different languages have also brought back to the forefront questions concerning
the relationship between language and cognition. These questions are addressed
here in terms of three comparative dimensions: by comparing satellite-framed vs.
verb-framed languages (Choi & Bowerman 1991; Slobin 2004; Talmy, 2000), which
present a striking typological contrast in their patterns of lexicalization (informa-
tion expressed in verbal roots) and of grammaticalization (for example, uses of
particles and/or of different utterance structures); by comparing different types
of learners, in particular monolingual and early bilingual children; as well as by
relating two different communicative modalities, speech and co-verbal gestures.
2. An overview of the contributions
The first paper by M. Kail proposes an overview of questions concerning early
comprehension in light of numerous methodological developments that provide
new challenges for the study of language development. Because language com-
prehension is less immediately accessible than production, it has long remained a
hidden dimension of young children’s linguistic competence. However, the study
of early comprehension has been entirely renewed by the emergence of new ex-
perimental paradigms, such as the study of eye movements and of evoked poten-
tials. The author surveys these paradigms and shows how they force us to revisit
our understanding of the emergence and development of grammar in the very
young child.
The next contribution by D. Bassano, K. Korecky-Kröll, I. Maillochon and
W. U. Dressler begins a series of three papers on the grammaticalization of nouns.
The authors propose a contrastive study of the acquisition of nominal determin-
ers in two languages, French and German. Starting with the typological contrast
between Germanic and Romance languages, which predicts an earlier develop-
ment of determiners in French as compared to German, the authors systematically
compare longitudinal production corpora of two children, one French and one
Austrian, between the ages of one and three years. They show how the acquisition
of determiners is influenced by the morphosyntactic properties of these languages
that interact with prosodic and semantico-syntactic factors.
In relation to this first paper, M. van Dijk and P. van Geert then examine
the processes of adaptation that take place between children’s language and adult
child-directed speech. Using longitudinal data from three children learning dif-
ferent languages (French, Austrian, Dutch), the study proposes new modelling
techniques that can describe the developmental patterns and variations in adap-
tive processes between children’s and adults’ speech. The variables examined are