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‘Can I put – I want a slippers to put on’: young children's development of request forms in a code-switching environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Valerie Youssef
Valerie Youssef*
Affiliation:
University of the West Indies, Trinidad & Tobago
*
Department of Language & Linguistics, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago, West Indies.
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Abstract

This paper concerns the development of semi-modal want/want to, and modals may, can and could in two Trinidadian children, whose Verb Phrase development was studied in naturalistic settings, between the ages of 2;3 and 4;1, and 2;4 and 4;9. The similarities and differences in development between the two are important for underlining a number of key factors in the acquisition process. Accepting the salience of requests/demands in early child language, the study draws attention to the child's propensity for using the means most readily available to him/her in the input, for expression of this function. Additionally, there is evidence of the child's ability to make stylistic discriminations at a very early age and of the propensity for making semantic distinctions among forms. The study indicates that work on the development of grammatical features is incomplete without consideration of sociolinguistic aspects of usage as integral to grammatical acquisition from the outset.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , October 1991 , pp. 609 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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