Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-sjtt6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-08T01:05:13.116Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The development of constructions from the right edge: a multinomial regression analysis of clitic left and right dislocation in child French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2020

Morgane JOURDAIN  and
Karen LAHOUSSE
Morgane JOURDAIN*
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Belgium University of Lille, France
Karen LAHOUSSE
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Belgium
*
*Corresponding author: Morgane Jourdain Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – box 3308 3000 Leuven Belgium. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The aim of the present research is to investigate the development of left and right dislocation in child French through a corpus study of three children until age 2;7 from the corpus of Lyon (Demuth & Tremblay, 2008). We extracted a total of 704 dislocations and analysed their syntactic properties. We show that (i) right dislocations are more frequent than left dislocations and (ii) left dislocations are significantly more complete than right dislocations (fewer omissions of verbs or pronouns). We compare these results to the hypothesis of Freudenthal, Pine, Jones & Gobet (2015, 2016) according to which some properties of child language can be explained by a learning mechanism from the right edge of the sentences from the input. We will show that this hypothesis can explain the general trend found in our data, but it is not sufficient to account for the entire development of dislocation in French.

Keywords

dislocationsyntaxFrench
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 48 , Special Issue 5: Special issue on Testable Theories of Core First Language Acquisition , September 2021 , pp. 1023 - 1047
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ashby, W. (1988). The syntax, pragmatics and sociolinguistics of left- and right-dislocations in French. Lingua, 75, 203–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auger, J. (1994). More evidence for agreement-marking in colloquial French. In Ashby, W. & Mithun, M. P., Perissinotto, G. & Rapossa, E. (Eds.), Linguistic perspectives on the romance languages (pp. 177–198). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Avanzi, M., Gendrot, C., & Lacheret-Dujour, A. (2010). Is there a prosodic difference between left-dislocated and heavy subjects? Evidence from spontaneous speech. Every language, Every Style, Speech Prosody, 5th International conference. Chicago.Google Scholar
Barnes, B. K. (1985). Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French. Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishing Company.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, E. (1976). Language and context, the acquisition of pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, INC.Google Scholar
Blasco-Dulbecco, M. (1999). Les dislocations en français contemporain: étude syntaxique. Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur.Google Scholar
Bloom, P. (1990). Subjectless sentences in child language. Linguistic Inquiry, 21(4), 491–504.Google Scholar
Bloom, P. (1993). Grammatical Continuity in Language Development: The Case of Subjectless Sentences. Linguistic Inquiry, 24(4), 721–734.Google Scholar
Culbertson, J. (2010). Convergent evidence for categorical change in French: from subject clitic to agreement marker. Language, 86(1), 85–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahlgren, S.-O. (2010). Word order. In Lutz, E. & de Jong, R. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Arabic language and linguistics. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. (2000). Structure Building and the Acquisition of Dislocations in Child French Proceedings of BUCLD 24 (pp. 242–252). Somerville: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. (2002). French Dislocation. (PhD thesis), University of York, UK.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. (2004). Apparent non-nominative subjects in L1 French In Prévost, P. & Paradis, J. (Eds.), The Acquisition of French in Different Contexts (pp. 60–115). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. (2007a). French dislocation without movement. Natural language & linguistic theory, 25(3), 485–534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, C. (2007b). French dislocation, interpretation, syntax, acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Demuth, K., & Tremblay, A. (2008). Prosodically-conditioned variability in children's production of French determiners. Journal of Child Language, 35(1), 99–127.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Déprez, V., & Pierce, A. (1993). Negation and functional projections in early grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 25–67.Google Scholar
Devescovi, A., & Cristina Caselli, M. (2007). Sentence repetition as a measure of early grammatical development in Italian. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 42(2), 187–208. doi:10.1080/13682820601030686CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferdinand, A. (1993). Subject dislocations in French child language. HIL Manuscripts, 54–64.Google Scholar
Ferdinand, A. (1996). The development of functional categories - the acquisition of the subject in French (Vol. 23). The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.Google Scholar
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., & Gobet, F. (2006). Unifying cross-linguistic and within-language patterns of finiteness marking in MOSAIC. In Sun, R. & Miyake, N. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 232–236). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Aguado-Orea, J., & Gobet, F. (2007). Modeling the developmental patterning of finiteness marking in English, Dutch, German and Spanish using MOSAIC. Cognitive Science, 31, 311–341.Google ScholarPubMed
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., & Gobet, F. (2007). Understanding the developmental dynamics of subject omission: the role of processing limitations in learning. Journal of Child Language, 34(1), 83–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., & Gobet, F. (2010). Explaining quantitative variation in the rate of Optional Infinitive errors across languages: A comparison of MOSAIC and the Variational Learning Model. Journal of Child Language, 37(3), 643–669.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Jones, G., & Gobet, F. (2015). Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children's declaratives and Wh- questions. Cognition, 143, 61–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Jones, G., & Gobet, F. (2016). Simulating developmental changes in noun richness through performance-limited distributional analysis. Paper presented at the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Friedmann, N., & Costa, J. (2011). Acquisition of SV and VS order in Hebrew, European Portuguese, Palestinian Arabic, and Spanish. Language Acquisition, 18, 1–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graf, E., Theakston, A., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2015). Subject and object omission in children's early transitive constructions: a discourse-pragmatic approach. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36, 701–727.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gupta, P. (2005). Primacy and recency in nonword repetition. Memory, 13, 318–324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gupta, P., Lipinski, J., Abbs, B., & Lin, P. H. (2005). Serial position effects in nonword repetition. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 141–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez-Bravo, R. (2005). Structural markedness and syntactic structure: a study of word order and the left periphery in Mexican Spanish. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haegeman, L. (1995). Root infinitives, tense, and truncated structures in Dutch. Language Acquisition, 4(3), 205–255.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hlavac, M. (2018). Stargazer: Well-formatted Regression and Summary Statistics Tables. R package version 5.2.2.. .Google Scholar
Horváth, M. G. (2018). Le français parlé informel, Stratégies de topicalisation. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyams, N., & Wexler, K. (1993). On the grammatical basis of null subjects in child language. Linguistic Inquiry, 24(3), 421–459.Google Scholar
Jourdain, M., & Canut, E. (2018). Les îlots verbaux dans les dislocations chez l'enfant français. SHS Web of Conferences, 46, doi: 10.1051/shsconf/20184610009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapetangianni, K. (2010). Variable Word Order in Child Greek. In Anderssen, M., Bentzen, K., & Westergaard, M. (Eds.), Variation in the Input: Studies in the Acquisition of Word Order (pp. 179–205). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.Google Scholar
Labelle, M., & Valois, D. (1996). The status of post-verbal subjects in French child language. Probus, 8(1), 53–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lahousse, K. (2003). Le sujet nominal postverbal en français moderne. (PhD thesis), KU Leuven, Leuven.Google Scholar
Lahousse, K. (2011). Quand passent les cigognes. Le sujet nominal postverbal en français contemporain. Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (1981). Topic, Antitopic and Verb Agreement in Non-Standard French (Perret, H. & Verschueren, J. Eds.). Amsterdam: John BenjaminsCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (2001). Dislocation. In Haspelmath, m. (Ed.), Language typology and language universals: an international handbook (pp. 1050–1078). Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Legendre, G., Culbertson, J., Barrière, I., Nazzi, T., & Goyet, L. (2010). Experimental and Empirical Evidence for the Status and Acquisition of Subject Clitices and Agreement Marking in Adult and Child Spoken French. In Torrens, V., Escobar, L., Gavarro, A., & Mangado, J. G. (Eds.), Movement and Clitics (pp. 333–360). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Mayol, L. (2010). Contrastive pronouns in null-subject Romance languages. Lingua, 120, 91–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naigles, L. R., & Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use. Journal of Child Language, 25(1), 95–120. doi:undefinedCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Parisse, C. (2008). Left-dislocated subjects: A construction typical of young French-speaking children? In Guijarro Fuentes, P., Pilar Larrañaga, M., & Clibbens, J. (Eds.), First Language Acquisition of Morphology and Syntax: Perspectives across Languages and Learners (pp. 13–30). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pekarek Doehler, S., De Stefani, E., & Horlacher, A.-S. (2015). Time and emergence in grammar: dislocation, topicalization and hanging topic in French talk-in interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pekarek Doehler, S., & Horlacher, A.-S. (2013). The patching-together of pivot patterns in talk-in-interaction: On “double dislocations” in French. Journal of Pragmatics, 54, 92–108. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.04.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English syntax. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Repp, S. (2010). Defining “contrast” as an information-structural notion in grammar. Lingua, 120(6), 1333–1345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1993). Early null subjects and root null subjects. In Hoekstra, T. & Schwartz, B. (Eds.), Language acquisition studies in generative grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1994). Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: the case of root infinitives. Language Acquisition, 3, 371–393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1997). The fine structure of the left periphery. In Haegeman, L. (Ed.), Elements of Grammar. A Handbook of Generative Syntax (pp. 281–337). Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Rossi, M. (1999). L'intonation. Le système du français : description et modélisation. Paris: Ophrys.Google Scholar
Shady, M., & Gerken, L. (1999). Grammatical and caregiver cues in early sentence comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 26(1), 163–175.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Temple, R. A. M., & Schladebeck, A. (2016). Systems, Prosodies, and the Phonology of French: New Insights from a Case Study of the Clitic Pronouns. French Studies, 70(3), 383–403. doi:10.1093/fs/knw126CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torrego, E. (1998). The dependencies of objects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veneziano, E., & Clark, E. (2016). Early verb constructions in French: adjacency on the left edge. Journal of Child Language, 43(6), 1193–1230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wijnen, F., Kempen, M., & Gillis, S. (2002). Root infinitives in Dutch early child language: an effect of input? Journal of Child Language, 28(3), 629–660. doi:10.1017/S0305000901004809Google Scholar
Yang, C. D. (2002). Knowledge and learning in natural language Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Zribi-Hertz, A. (1994). The syntax of nominative clitics in Standard and Advanced French. In Cinque, G., Koster, J. P., Rizzi, J.Y., Luigi, & R. Zanuttini, (Eds.), Paths towards universal grammar (pp. 453–472). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar