32.1801, Diss: Language Acquisition: Morgane Jourdain: '' A quantitative and qualitative corpus study of the acquisition of topic constructions in child French''

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1801. Mon May 24 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1801, Diss: Language Acquisition: Morgane Jourdain: '' A quantitative and qualitative corpus study of the acquisition of topic constructions in child French''

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Date: Mon, 24 May 2021 13:27:27
From: Morgane Jourdain [morgane.jourdain at kuleuven.be]
Subject: A quantitative and qualitative corpus study of the acquisition of topic constructions in child French

 
Institution: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven 
Program: PhD in Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2020 

Author: Morgane Jourdain

Dissertation Title: A quantitative and qualitative corpus study of the
acquisition of topic constructions in child French 

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition


Dissertation Director(s):
Emmanuelle Canut
Karen Lahousse
Cécile De Cat

Dissertation Abstract:

In my research, I investigated the interaction between information structure
(IS) and syntax in child French, focusing on the acquisition of topic. My main
goal is to determine whether the relational and referential dimensions of IS
are both present from the beginning of language acquisition. This study is
based  on a corpus analysis of left (1) and right (2) dislocations (LD and RD)
produced by 99 children between age 1,5 and 7. 

(1) Les chats ils font miaou. ‘Cats meow.’ (Flavie, corpus TCOF, 6;1.4)
(2) Où il est le papillon? ‘Where’s the butterfly?’ (Marie, corpus Lyon,
2;1.13)
The main contributions of this project to the field are the following:
Syntax: We show that children start producing dislocations as soon as they are
able to produce multiword utterances. As a result, their first dislocation
attempts often lack items that are compulsory in adult speech, such as verbs
‎(3). 
(3) Là ça. ‘There that.’ (Anaïs, corpus Lyon, 1;11.26)

Their productions become adult-like before age 3. At first, children mostly
dislocate subjects. Younger children also produce more dislocated
demonstrative pronouns than older children, who produce more lexical NPs.

Information structure: The children from our corpora produce dislocations with
adult-like referential and relational information structure: they only produce
dislocated constituents that correspond to the aboutness topic of the sentence
(following the definitions of Lambrecht, 1994, and Reinhart, 1981). These
children also only select referents which are somehow accessible in the
discourse or physical context as topics.

Differences between LD and RD: In adult French, LD and RD exhibit different
properties: LD can express contrastive topics, and topic shift. RD is more
frequently used for topic maintenance, and is more frequent than LD for
interrogative sentences. Using a logistic regression model, we show that from
age 2, children follow adult-like patterns in their productions of LD and RD.
Differences between dislocated and non-dislocated subjects: I compare the IS
properties of dislocated and non-dislocated subjects produced by a subset of
the children of our corpora. For lexical NPs, children dislocate the subject
if it is the topic of the sentence, but do not dislocate it if it belongs to
the focus of the sentence. As for pronouns, children dislocate them if they
convey less accessible referents (such as situationally given) or if they
express a contrastive topic. We also compare the frequency of dislocation in
two registers, conversation and narration, and show that from age 4, children
produce fewer dislocations in narration than in conversation. 
The acquisition of the concept of topic: I investigated the degree of lexical
and semantic productivity of dislocations in early child speech. Under the
usage-based approach, I argue that children’s first dislocation attempts are
based on item-based schemas, which contain fixed lexical items, and which have
more context-specific functions than topic-marking. I hypothesize that these
early concrete functions cluster and form the topic-marking function through
analogy.




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