Hoe jong Afrikaanssprekende kinders betekenis aan hul vroeë taalgebruik verbind

Brink, Nina; Breed, Adri

doi:10.17159/2224-7912/2017/v57n4a10

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(52 reference statements)

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“…Turning to production, there is evidence of the early presence of negation in child language, with the equivalent of no being an early-acquired word in the holophrastic stage (see Brink, 2017, for Afrikaans). The only traceable study of negation in Afrikaans-speaking children is that of Vorster (1982).…”

Section: The L1 Acquisition Of Negationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

2022

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Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about through the reanalysis of a discourse-dependent (pragmatically conditioned) structure in Dutch, reinforced by proponents of the standardisation of Afrikaans who prescriptively imposed a negative concord structure onto the Dutch negation system. The Afrikaans negation system is therefore argued to be artificially created, making it crosslinguistically rare and syntactically complex, the latter possibly having a delaying effect on acquisition. This study investigates both the comprehension and production of negation by young child speakers of Afrikaans. Sentences containing negative indefinites (NIs) ( niks ‘nothing’ and geen ‘no’/ ‘none’ with a final negative particle) are compared with those containing two negative particles (referred to as SN), which are syntactically less complex. We examined (1) whether the comprehension of sentences with NIs is more difficult to acquire than that of sentences using SN and (2) when and how negation is produced by young children. Data were collected through a picture selection task (comprehension) and recordings of spontaneous speech during free play (production). Results show that the comprehension of SN was acquired before that of NI, indicating that sentences containing NIs were indeed more difficult to comprehend than those containing SN. The production data showed that even the youngest participants (age 3;0) could produce grammatically well-formed negated constructions, but that errors occurred until age 4;3. In comparison with that found for other West Germanic languages, Afrikaans’ complex system of expressing negation seems to have a delaying effect on the comprehension of negation, specifically NIs, but not on production.

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Section: The L1 Acquisition Of Negationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

2022

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“…More recent literature in this field has been grounded in communication disorders (see Gândara and Befi-Lopes 2010, Hann et al 2017, McDaniel et al 2018, Sandbank et al 2017, Windfuhr et al 2002 and the influence of socio-economic status, race/ethnicity, or gender among preschoolers on their communicative function use (Fannin et al 2018). However, as argued in Brink and Breed (2017), the field of Afrikaans first language acquisition of typicallydeveloping children is still under-researched. Tomasello (2003: 37) states that young children of linguistic communities from around the world combine basic speech act motives with their salient scenes of experience to "do" certain things with their earliest productive language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A usage-based investigation of Afrikaans-speaking children’s holophrases and communicative intentions

Brink

2020

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Children of all languages use their first lexical items to express a variety of meanings or communicative intentions. The phase during which young children start to use their first lexical items is commonly characterised from a usage-based approach as a holophrastic stage because these lexical items, although just a single linguistic unit, are often used to fulfil more complex communicative intentions. The meaning of the lexical item is therefore mostly derived from the communicative context in which the utterance takes place. A holophrase is defined as one linguistic symbol that functions as a whole utterance and expresses more than the conventional meaning of that symbol. Studies on the communicative functions of children's holophrases do exist, but this phenomenon has not yet been studied in Afrikaans first language acquisition. Tomasello (2003: 37) provides a list of what young children from around the world normally do with their language (i.e. intentions typically expressed), and this study investigates to what extent these communicative intentions can also be applied to novel usage-based data of 20 Afrikaans-speaking children's first lexical items. This study reveals that the communicative intentions as expressed by Tomasello also describe the Afrikaans data set although some of the descriptions of the categories are expanded to include a larger variety of samples from the Afrikaans data. Furthermore, two other types of communicative intentions are identified in the Afrikaans data, namely to express an emotion/feeling, and to respond to a conversation partner by means of imitation. Other studies done on children's expression of emotions and imitations of words provide further evidence that children also use their language to communicate these intentions. As such, this article contributes to the body of literature on Afrikaans first language acquisition as an under-researched field.

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Hoe jong Afrikaanssprekende kinders betekenis aan hul vroeë taalgebruik verbind

Abstract: The way in which young Afrikaans children connect meaning to their early vocabularyThe acquisition of a first language can be described as becoming proficient in the phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax and semantics (and pragmatics)

Cited by 2 publications

References 38 publications

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

A usage-based investigation of Afrikaans-speaking children’s holophrases and communicative intentions

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