going-to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development

Abstract

This paper provides a corpus-linguistic, usage-based approach to the acquisition of be-going-to-V and be-gonna-V. Based on longitudinal data from two American children, it is argued that the constructions develop on the basis of several low-level chunks of varying degrees of morphosyntactic complexity. I propose an empirical way of grouping these chunks according to their structural and developmental properties, which allows us to trace how constructional networks emerge, expand and change in early childhood. In addition, this method reveals insights into the way the historically transmitted layering of the constructions is accessed in language acquisition. In particular, I uncover and account for apparent 'grammaticalization e¤ects' in child speech, and discuss the relationship between acquisition and change in the cognitive-functional paradigm. . Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Daniel Wiechmann, Holger Diessel and three anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments and suggestions on the paper. Special thanks go to Katja Hetterle for checking on coding reliability, and to Stefan Th. Gries for providing and discussing several algorithms used in this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. Brought to you by | University of Birmingham Authenticated Download Date | 5/30/15 7:52 AM Brought to you by | University of Birmingham Authenticated Download Date | 5/30/15 7:52 AM 10. The opposite perspective, i.e., that in historical grammaticalization, adult members of a speech community ''are 'recapitulating' developmental processes from early childhood'', was already forcefully refuted by Slobin (1994: 128).going-to-V and gonna-V in child language 531Brought to you by | University of Birmingham Authenticated Download Date | 5/30/15 7:52 AM

Phrasal Verbs: Usage and Acquisition

“…The impact of such theories on our understanding of child language acquisition has consisted in emphasizing the importance of a construction built piece by piece, 'mosaic-like' (Robert & Chapouthier, 2006;Schmidtke-Bode, 2009), and based on lexical items rather than rules until very late. Tomasello"s verb-island hypothesis (1992) thus states that the child first learns words in chunks in specific constructions.…”

Grammaticalization and language acquisition

“…The ontogenetic development of the be-going-to future takes a similar path. Drawing on comprehensive corpus data from several English-speaking children, Schmidtke-Bode (2009) found that the earliest utterances in which go occurs with an implicit future meaning denote a motion event that is combined with some other activity, as in the following example from a two-year old boy (adopted from Schmidtke-Bode 2009: 526).…”

“…The previous literature on the relationship between ontogeny and diachrony has been mainly concerned with parallels in morphology and phonology, but there are also intriguing parallels in the development of grammatical markers, suggesting that grammaticalization is not only a historical phenomenon but can also be found in child language (cf. Givón 1979Givón , 2009Givón and Shibatani 2009;Schmidtke-Bode 2009;Slobin 1994;Ziegeler 1997). On this view, the notion of grammaticalization refers to a general developmental process that is instantiated in both language acquisition and diachronic change (cf.…”

Corpus linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and cognitive/psycholinguistics: Towards more and more fruitful exchanges

“…When corpus linguists talk about dispersion, which they do too rarely, cognitive and psycholinguists become interested because dispersion has implications for psycholinguistic experiments and learning/ acquisition (cf. Simpson and Ellis 2005;Ambridge et al 2006;Schmidtke-Bode 2009).…”