Two First Languages: Early Grammatical Development in Bilingual Children 9783110846065, 9783110131338

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Two First Languages

STUDIES ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION This series will focus on both first language acquisition and second/ foreign language learning. It will include studies on language acquisition in educational settings, first/second/foreign language loss, and early b i l i n g u a l i s m . High quality dissertations and other individual works will be considered for publication, and also collections of papers from international workshops and conferences. The primary goal of the series is to draw international attention to current research in The Netherlands on language acquisition. Editors of SOLA: Guus Extra, Tilburg University Ton van der Geest, Groningen University Peter Jordens, Free University Amsterdam Jürgen Meisel, Hamburg University Barry McLaughlin, University of California, Santa Cruz Sven Strömqvist, University of Göteborg Also published in this series: 1. G u u s Extra and Ton Vallen (eds.) Ethnic Minorities and Dutch as a Second Language 2. B. Weltens, K. de Bot and T. van Els (eds.) Language Attrition in Progress 3. Sascha W. Felix Cognition and Language Growth 4. Ludo Verhoeven Ethnic Minority Children Acquiring Literacy 5. Allan James and Jonathan Leather (eds.) Sound Patterns in Second Language Acquisition 6. Bert Weltens The Attrition of French as a Foreign Language 7. James Pankhurst, Mike Sharwood Smith and Paul van Buren (eds.) Learnability and Second Languages 8. Nanda Poulisse, in collaboration with Theo Bongaerts and Eric Kellerman The Use of Compensatory Strategies by Dutch Learners of English 9. Pieter Reitsma and Ludo Verhoeven (eds.) Acquisition of Reading in Dutch

Jürgen M. Meisel (ed.)

Two First Languages Early Grammatical Development in Bilingual Children

1990 FORIS PUBLICATIONS Dordrecht - Holland/Providence Rl - U.S.A.

Published by: Foris Publications Holland P.O. Box 509 3300 AM Dordrecht, The Netherlands Distributor for the U.S.A. and Canada: Foris Publications USA, Inc. P.O. Box 5904 Providence Rl 02903 U.S.A.

CIP-DATA K O N I N K L I J K E BIBLIOTHEEK, DEN HAAG Two

Two First Languages : Early Grammatical Development in Bilingual Children / Jürgen M. Meisel (ed.). - Dordrecht [etc.] : Foris. - (Studies on Language Acquisition ; 10) With ref. ISBN 90-6765-500-7 SISO 803.3 UDC 800.73-053.2 Subject heading: bilingualism.

ISBN 90 6765 500 7 © 1990 Foris Publications - Dordrecht No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright owner. Printed in The Netherlands by ICG Printing, Dordrecht

CONTENTS

Jürgen M. Meisel Preface

1

Chapter 1 Jürgen M. Meisel: Grammatical development in the simultaneous acquisition of two first languages

5

Chapter 2 Andreas Collings The acquisition of morphology and syntax in German child language

23

Chapter 3 Sabine Meinen & Helga Kadow The acquisition of French by monolingual children. A review of the literature

47

Chapter 4 Suzanne Schlyter Introducing the DUFDE project

73

Chapter 5 Suzanne Schlyter The acquisition of tense and aspect

87

Chapter 6 Swantje Klinge Prepositions in bilingual language acquisition

123

Chapter 7 Teresa Parodi The acquisition of word order regularities and case morphology

157

Chapter 8

Natascha Müller Developing two gender assignment systems simultaneously

193

Chapter 9 Jürgen M. Meise/ INFL-ection: Subjects and subject-verb agreement

237

Bibliography

301

Index

313

PREFACE

This volume presents the major part of the results obtained up to now in a research project studying the grammatical development of bilingual children who acquire two first languages simultaneously, French and German. This research enterprise was initiated at the University of Hamburg in 1980. We named it DUFDE (Deutsch und Französisch - Doppelter Erstspracherwerb/German and French Simultaneous First Language Acquisition), and this became the name of the research group as well. In the early years, this group consisted of a research assistant, a group of students, and myself.

From

April

1986,

we

have

received

funding

from

the

DFG

(Deutsche

Forschungsgemeinschaft). The material support, both from the DFG and from the University of Hamburg, is hereby gratefully acknowledged. Without their help, this kind of work would not be possible. It is obvious, I think, that all this would have been in vain without the enthousiasm of the people who have been or still are part of the DUFDE team: Gisela Berkele, Marie-Claude Bourcy, Marianne Dieck, Pascale Guenard, Susanne Jekat-Rommel, Martina Jürgens, Georg Kaiser, Swantje Klinge, Caroline Koehn, Regina Koppe, Brigitte Mantilleri, Natascha Müller, Teresa Parodi, Ulrike Rohde-Hurpin, Angelika Schenk, Suzanne Schlyter, Mari-Annick Schöpfet, Cornelia Schultz, and Anke Siegerist. Not to forget the honorary member of the group, Axel Mahlau. In my opinion, they are dufde. Above all, however, we want to thank the children we studied and their parents. Unfortunately, we cannot mention their names here, since they should remain anonymous. Too much of their private lives is, in any event, made public by our publication. Later on, the children - when grown up - may enjoy reading about their early years. But it is up to them to disclose their identity - or not to do so. We nevertheless want to express our warmest thanks, and we hope that the results of our activities will turn out to be interesting and useful for them as well. Be this as it may, knowing the children and their parents - in some cases over many years - has been a most rewarding experience for us, and a number of friendships have developed out of it. Again and again, we have been amazed over all these years how patiently the families tolerated our intrusion into their privacy - and some of them continue to do so! I think most people cannot imagine what it means to have regular "visitors" every second week for three, four, five, and more years. Merci and danke schön!

Preface Let me add a few words concerning the organization of the book. The analyses of bilingual language development presented in this volume - i.e. chapters 4 through 9 - all refer to the same data base, i.e. the DUFDE children, and they attempt to give a unified picture of a number of aspects of this type of language acquisition. Nevertheless, where authors do not agree with respect to the interpretation of a phenomenon, no attempt has been made to harmonize conflicting statements. In general, it should be possible to read each chapter individually. This means that one has to allow for a certain amount of redundancy in the different contributions, for they occasionally summarize briefly what has been dealt with in more detail in some other chapter. In order to avoid too much redundancy, certain kinds of information on the empirical methods used, e.g. data collection procedures, but also background information on the children studied, are given in chapter 4. It would therefore be helpful to read this chapter before turning to the others. Chapter 1 outlines some of the theoretical problems which are addressed in the other studies and establish the motivation for our research. Chapters 2 and 3 try to summarize what is known about the chronology of monolingual acquisition of grammar in the two languages studied here, German and French. This should help to answer the question whether bilingual first language acquisition differs in substance and in quality from monolingual development. The authors of chapters 4 through 9 wrote their contributions as members of the DUFDE team. Andreas Collings (chapter 2) is a research associate in the Department of Linguistics of the University of Düsseldorf. Sabine Meinen and Helga Kadow (chapter 3) graduated from the University of Hamburg, Department of Romance Languages. I want to thank all of them for their cooperation. Most of all, however, I want to express my gratitude to Susanne Carroll, Georg Kaiser, and Natascha Müller for their editorial assistance. They were willing to do some of the tedious work which the reader only notices when it is not well done.

Jürgen M. Meisel Universität Hamburg Romanisches Seminar January 1990

CHAPTER 1

GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE SIMULTANEOUS ACQUISITION OF TWO FIRST LANGUAGES

Jürgen M. Melsel

6

Two First Languages

O. INTRODUCTION. The aim of this chapter is to outline very briefly the rationale underlying the research enterprise on bilingual first language acquisition, some results of which will be presented in the following chapters. I will attempt to explain the fundamental research interests which motivate our study, beyond the

analysis of particular grammatical phenomena. To avoid a

possible

misunderstanding: explaining one's interests is not equivalent to justifying them. This would require a state-of-the-art description of the research on first language acquisition and partly also a description of the theory of grammar, a task far beyond the scope of the present chapter. It may nevertheless be useful to expose one's motivations for specific research activities, independently of whether they merge or not with current trends in theory or practice. The main purpose for this is to situate particular studies in the broader context of the language sciences or, more generally yet, the cognitive sciences. But there is another, secondary, reason for this short presentation. It is the well-known dilemma of empirical research - especially of longitudinal studies - that theories frequently change before the data which were meant to test certain hypotheses are collected. Or, possibly worse, the researcher loses faith in his own theoretical approach before the data collection is completed. In either case, a possible way to cope with thess dilemmas is to make one's underlying interests explicit and, if necessary, to recast the questions asked in the framework of current theoretical concerns. As will become apparent in what follows, our own analyses had initially been strongly influenced by so-called functionalist approaches, most notably by Givon (1979). And the search for evidence of "syntacticization" was a central concern of our work for an extended period of time; see Meisel (1985, 1986). But we eventually came to the conclusion that, at least in a number of areas studied, no such evidence is available. It appears, instead, that the child is using syntax from early on. This has lead us to the conclusion that it is inevitable to work within the framework of a syntactic (better: a grammatical) theory, even when analyzing very early child language. Generative Grammar in its Government and Binding (GB) or in the Principles and Parameters version is such a theory, see Chomsky (1981, 1986), and it is the one we chose. This change of theoretical framework quite obviously implies, among other things, that some questions are asked differently and that new questions arise. In what follows, I will sketch the questions guiding our study, and I will briefly explain the shift of theoretical assumptions, as well as some of the consequences this has had for specific analyses of child language.

Meisel: Grammatical Development

7

1. BASIC RESEARCH INTERESTS AND GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS.

One way to describe the achievements of language acquisition is to observe that adult language use is largely independent of the context of communication, whereas the child is initially incapable of expressing needs which go beyond what emerges from the immediate context of interaction. And the child's communicative means, too, are originally attached to the ego-hicnunc 'me-here-now' of the situation. This corresponds to what K. Bühler (1934) called the •ich-Origo1 of discourse. One prerequisite which must be met for the process of gradual detachment from the restrictions of the immeditate context to be possible is undoubtedly cognitive maturation. But it is equally plausible to assume that becoming independent of the bonds of the situation requires the development of a grammatical competence; see, for example, Bickerton (1981) who explains very clearly the role of grammar in language ontogenesis as well as in phylogenesis. Note that certain versions of a functionalist model have rejected the possibility of abstract linguistic categories as mental representations, e.g. Bates & MacWhinney (1982), Bates, MacWhinney & Smith (1983). But these theoretical sketches were of a rather programmatic kind and have apparently not been pursued much further in their radical versions. Similar hypotheses, however, are suggested in the more recent framework of connectionist approaches to language, e.g. McClelland, Rumelhart et al. (eds.) (1986). Yet there remain serious doubts whether this model can adequately capture language behavior, especially as evidenced by children, see for example Pinker & Prince (1988). For the time being, I will therefore assume without further discussion that adults have access to a system of implicit knowledge about language which one may call their grammatical competence. This grammar, together with a number of other mental representations of knowledge, and supplemented by language processing mechanisms, makes up the central part of a person's ability to use language. If this is basically correct, the question immediately arises whether this grammar, or a modified and possibly simplified version of it, is already accessible in early childhood. Alternatively, one might hypothesize that children must initially do without it until they develop a grammatical competence. In the latter case, the question is what kind of knowledge and which mechanisms shape the children's early language and, rather crucially, how one can account for the transition from one kind of competence to the other. A number of stimulating suggestions concerning these problems have been put forth by Givon (1985). He argues that humans are able to perceive language structure independently of its function. Furthermore, he distinguishes between two extreme poles on a continuum of communicative modalities, i.e. the pragmatic mode and the syntactic mode, see Givon (1979:222f, 1985). The crucial hypothesis concerning language development is that the pragmatic mode precedes ontogenetically and possibly also phylogenetically the syntactic mode. This amounts to

8

Two First Languages

saying that the organizing principles underlying early language use are pragmatic-semantic in nature. There must thus be a process of syntacticization (or grammaticization) by which grammatical encodings replace earlier semantico- pragmatic encodings. These hypotheses allow the formulation of an interesting research program, involving questions like the following: Is there evidence for a process of grammaticization? Is the emergence of grammatical devices functionally driven, or is there evidence for an independent development of grammatical means of expressions? In other words, are grammatical encodings necessarily preceded by semanticopragmatic ones? It appears that the issue of concern here - i.e. the "origin of grammatical encodings" (Slobin, 1982a) - can be attacked from different sides. Either one attempts to define more precisely the early semantico-pragmatic

entities and

searches to find empirical confirmation for

grammaticization, or one starts from the assumption that the development of the grammatical competence is an autonomous area of cognitive development. In the latter case, one will have to give empirical support for the claim that grammatical principles determine the form of child utterances from early on and that they develop (at least in part) independently of the semantic or pragmatic functions which they express. I believe that there are empirical as well as principled reasons for choosing the second alternative. As for the empirical reasons, I will, at this point, simply refer to an earlier analysis of case marking and word order phenomena by Meisel (1986) where the functional approach proved to be incapable of explaining the facts. Instead, this study yielded strong evidence for very early syntactic encodings. Much more evidence of this kind is offered in this volume, most notably in chapters 7 through 9. The theoretical motivations for choosing the second alternative stem from the fact that the so-called continuity assumption (Pinker, 1984; see also White, 1982 and Hyams, 1983, 1986) may be regarded as the null hypothesis in developmental studies. Summarizing this line of argument in a few words, one may say that it starts from the assumption mentioned above that a mental representation of grammatical knowledge forms an essential part of the adult's language capacity - a belief shared by at least some advocates of a functionalist model, e.g. Givon (1979). What makes the difference is that by applying Occam's Razor, we are lead to the conclusion that "the fewer the mechanisms, the more parsimonious the theory and the more explanatory its accounts." (Pinker, 1984:6). In the case of grammatical development, this entails that one will start from the hypothesis that the child has access to the same kind of linguistic knowledge as the adult. But "the same kind" may be interpreted in different ways, and this yields stronger or weaker versions of the continuity assumption. In its stronger version, it asserts that the grammar of child language makes use of the same kind of theoretical vocabulary as the one which is needed for the grammar of adult language. It is further assumed that child grammars do not violate the principles of Universal Grammar (UG). A weaker version still maintains that the language of children is organized according to principles

Meisel: Grammatical Development

9

and categories of the same nature as those underlying the language of adults (i.e. morphological and syntactic ones, as opposed to semantic-pragmatic strategies), but it allows for the possibility that early grammatical knowledge undergoes maturational changes, as suggested by Gleitman (1981), Felix (1984,1987), Borer & Wexler (1987), and others.1 The choice between the stronger and the weaker version of the continuity assumption is hopefully - an empirical problem. What matters at this point is that any theory proposing an initial phase with semantic-pragmatic categories/processing

and

a subsequent phase of

grammaticization must carry the burden of proof. It is therefore not sufficient, as an argument against grammatical explanations, to claim that functional descriptions can equally well account for the data, see Bates & MacWhinney (1982). At any rate, the logic of this argument can easily be reversed: there is no need for functional explanations if grammatical ones can account for the observed facts. And this version gains considerably in plausibility by the continuity assumption. The debate about what constitutes the null hypothesis is, thus, not a futile intellectual game, for it leads to important consequences for the research strategy one adopts. It means that it is not necessary to make specific efforts in an attempt to find empirical proof against alternative solutions. Instead, the discussion must focus on the question of whether the available evidence is compatible or not with the adopted hypothesis. Unless compelling evidence to the contrary is found, the assumption supported by the null hypothesis may be regarded as well-motivated. In case studies on early grammatical development, this is frequently a decisive factor, since the available data base is normally extremely narrow. When a child begins to use the first verb forms, to mention one example, he will obviously not use dozens of such forms during one recording session. There may only exist a handful of examples on the basis of which the researcher must construct his hypotheses, deciding, for example, whether or not to classify these uses as instantiations of the grammatical category "verb". A comparison with other case studies can be of some help, but it does not alter the problem significantly. Diary studies may provide more tokens - but the problem remains essentially the same. Experimental techniques often fail at this age (below 2;0), and I very much doubt whether cross-sectional data are of any use at all when it comes to such fine-grained analyses. The situation becomes even worse when different hypotheses agree in their empirical predictions. It is, for example, a well-known fact that in languages like English, "subject", "agent", and "theme" (or "topic") coincide in more than 80% of the uses in colloquial speech. How, then, does one decide whether the child has access to grammatical notions such as "subject" when he begins to use multi-word utterances? The critical 10% (or even less, since the passive is not yet acquired) may amount to one or two utterances! What I want to illustrate is that it may be deceiving to claim that certain problems can be solved "empirically". Quite frequently, there exist only empirical solutions of the kind mentioned above, i.e. part of the data confirm more than one explanatory hypothesis, and only a fraction of the data allows one to decide between competing approaches. Let me stress the fact that this scenario is

10

Two First Languages

not an artifact of a specific theory; although it is not always admitted, all researchers working on early child language have to face this problem. In other words, "empirical solutions" may turn out to depend to a large extent on theoretical assumptions, including what counts as the null hypothesis. As I have tried to explain above, we adhere to the continuity assumption as the null hypothesis. This entails the assumption that children have access, from early on, to grammatical encodings. It still remains to be seen whether these early grammars are "possible grammars", as defined by UG, or whether UG itself is subject to maturation. Note that our approach does not necessarily exclude the possibility that children make use of semantic-pragmatic information in a crucial way, either as a means of discovering the functions of linguistic devices, or in order to organize their early utterances. If, for example, Pinker's (1984:37ff) semantic bootstrapping hypothesis turns out to be correct, perceptually available semantic notions do, in fact, serve to identify basic sets of elements which are then assigned to syntactic categories and relations defined by UG. Note that, according to this hypothesis, such syntactic notions, as well as other principles and parameters of UG, are not themselves said to be learned. Rather, it is assumed that the child is already equipped with this kind of linguistic knowledge, see Pinker (1984:31ff). This avoids the paradox inherent in empiricist approaches: how would the child know, equipped only with inductive learning mechanisms, that he has discovered the formal properties of, for example, the syntactic category verb - if he does not know, a priori, what a verb is. In other words: how do you know a verb when you see one? Our hypothesis, thus, is that already during early phases of language acquisition, children develop grammatical knowledge constrained by UG as well as by specific properties of the respective (adult) target grammars. A natural consequence of this hypothesis is that one has to work within the framework of a theory of grammar, instead of making eclectic use of notions borrowed from different theoretical models, as is frequently the case in language acquisition studies. This commitment to one theory should help to avoid ad hoc solutions for specific problems. Rather, the analyses provided by the grammatical theory should be independently motivated, i.e. not by the currently discussed issues in child language themselves. Furthermore, the theory must be well elaborated in order to be able to offer descriptively adequate accounts of the grammatical areas under discussion. Most importantly, it should aim at explanatory adequacy, as defined by Chomsky (1965:18ff). In other words, one must assume that it can explain the grammatical knowledge of a native speaker, as well as the fact that he is able to acquire the grammar of his native language. Note that it is essential to make such an assumption if one sets about analyzing the development of grammar — notwithstanding the fact that no existing theory of grammar may fully meet such a requirement. I believe that Generative Grammar, as developed by Chomsky (1981,1986) and others, is a possible, if not the best candidate for the kind of theory needed; but I will not even attempt to explain this choice, for this would be a task

Meisel: Grammatical Development

11

task which cannot be accomplished within the limits of this chapter. Let me add, however, that I will readily concede that there do exist other possible candidates, e.g. Lexical Functional Grammar. At this point, I merely want to add a remark on the consequences for language acquisition studies if one opts for Generative Grammar. This has to do with the question of how principles of UG determine formal properties of early child language. One can, in fact, imagine a number of different ways in which this may actually happen. In earlier versions of Generative Grammar, this claim was interpreted as leading to a process of hypothesis testing, constrained by innate universale. In its more recent GB-version, parametrized principles of grammar are suggested; see Borer (1984) and Roeper & Williams (eds.) (1987) for a more detailed discussion of this issue. This is to say that the principles themselves hold universally, but certain parameters are left unspecified, i.e. they can be interpreted differently in different grammars. In other words, the values are set differently for the parameters, and the domain of application of the principle may vary. In language acquisition then, the child has to set the value of the parameter for a certain principle already given by UG, rather than testing hypotheses about the form of a specific rule. The range of variation is limited by the number of possible values (usually two or three). Material in the input data will enable the child to determine how to set the parameter for a given grammar. Quite obviously, however, although it is a crucial phenomenon in language development, parameter setting does not exhaustively describe the process of acquisition. First of all, not all properties of the grammar which the child has to acquire are specified by UG, and not all principles of UG are parametrized. More importantly, the child has to acquire a certain amount of linguistic material to which general principles can be applied. In other words, it is reasonable to predict that, initially, child utterances need not yet conform to universal principles, because they still lack the properties which define the domain of application for such principles. I will return to this point, below in 2. 2. IN SEARCH OF THE LOGIC OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT.

Let me now first summarize some of the ideas and hypotheses which guide our research on the simultaneous acquisition of two first languages by bilingual children. The basic assumption, thus, is that grammatical development can be fruitfully studied as an autonomous area of cognition. Following the hypothesis developed by Givon (1979, 1985), we are also assuming that one may distinguish between a pragmatic and a grammatical (syntactic) mode of language processing, although we do not see convincing evidence in support of the claim that the former necessarily precedes the latter in language ontogenesis. But the answer to this question is not presupposed; it is one of the goals of our research to find out about this. As a starting hypothesis, however, we

12

Two First Languages

will assume that grammaticization is not a necessary transitional phase in all and not even in most areas of grammatical development. 2.1. Grammar as an autonomous area of cognitive development. Note that if put this way, the question is not "grammatical or pragmatic competence?", but rather 'is grammar available from early on?'. If the answer is "yes" - and we believe it is - one may continue to ask how grammatical and pragmatic factors relate in the process of language acquisition. They may develop in an autonomous fashion; or one may set the pace for the other. Functionalist approaches will obviously predict that formal aspects of language are acquired via their functional properties, or at least that a direct mapping from function to form will make the task easier for the child. Admittedly, "autonomy" does not, of course, preclude cooperation (or competiton!). But again, our starting hypothesis is that the development of formal linguistic devices need not be functionally driven. From the obvious fact that formal means of expression are used to express semantic-pragmatic functions, it does not necessarily follow that these functions determine the underlying logic of grammatical development. The reverse is equally plausible, i.e. that a system-internal logic determines the development of formal devices. Their availability may thus be a prerequisite for the need for new functions to emerge, and the new array of forms may then be exploited for functional purposes. In other words, in focusing on language as "a formal problem-space" for children, we expect to find that the underlying logic of the development of early grammatical encodings itself is grammatical (formal) in nature. In order to be able to test our hypotheses, we will first have to establish developmental sequences for a number of grammatical phenomena. On the basis of descriptively adequate accounts of the facts of early language acquisition, one may then proceed to investigate what causes/motivates the documented order of acquisition. If these causes can be revealed, they may be regarded as constituting the underlying logic which explains the observed properties of language acquisition processes. It may be useful, at this point, to make clear that focusing on the role of grammar in language acquisition does not mean that a monocausal approach is favored. As has been mentioned before, see section 1 of this chapter, a distinction is being made between grammatical and pragmatic competence. Universal Grammar is regarded as an essential part of the human language faculty, but other components of the "language making capacity" (Slobin, 1985a) are equally part of it and need to be studied if one wants to explain language acquisition. This is to say that although UG does indeed, according to our hypothesis, function as a "language acquisition device (LAD), as it used to be called, one cannot hope to explain the patterns of language development unless various mechanisms of language processing and discovery procedures are also taken into account.

Meisel: Grammatical Development

13

As has already been mentioned, the "principles and parameters* version of UG allows us to make a number of predictions about the process of language development. Among other things, the idea of parameter setting implies that a set of apparently unrelated grammatical phenomena will simultaneously become available to the child if they are related to one specific parameter. More importantly, language acquisition, under this perspective, means that implicitly available grammatical knowledge is triggered in the course of acquisition, possibly as a result of lexical learning. But there is still learning in the traditional sense, of course, since universal principles and parameters only cover part of the grammatical knowledge the child has to discover. In other words, language acquisition involves triggering as well as learning of knowledge; see Carroll (1989) for a discussion of some issues involved in this distinction. This is where the mechanisms of language processing come into play. In order for the child to be able to identify the units of language to which universal principles can be applied, he must have available not only a parsing mechanism, but also some language-specific discovery procedures. Similarly, there need to be strategies which enable the child to detect language-specific properties of the grammar which do not fall in the domain of universal principles. Quite obviously, there also exist principles and strategies of language processing, independently of the task of acquisition. Whether or not they are identical to language learning mechanisms need not be decided at this point. In sum, we cannot hope to reveal the underlying forces of language acquisition and to discover the logic of developmental patterns unless we study the mechanisms, principles, and strategies which, together with the principles of UG, enable the child to acquire and to use language. At this point, we need not be concerned with the problem of defining more precisely the exact form and specific properties of these mechanisms. Psycholinguistic research has gathered an abundant wealth of knowledge about language use by children and by adults. As far as acquisitional mechanisms are concerned, it is plausible to assume that the operating principles suggested by Slobin (1973,1985a) and others, see also Slobin (ed.) (1985), capture an important number of their essential properties. What all this amounts to is the claim that it will be necessary to focus on the role of language-specific structures in language acquisition. In other words, in our pursuit of the above—mentioned question of what is the "system-internal logic", universal principles can only lead us part of the way. Another part depends on the particular way in which grammatical notions are coded in different languages and on whether it is more or less difficult for the child to crack this code and to actively use the newly acquired devices. It is, thus, possible that certain coding devices are more difficult to discover/process/learn for the child and might therefore be acquired later, independently of their functions. A number of findings reported in this volume seem to lend support to these claims. To mention an example, case marking by means of free morphemes (prepositions), as in French, apparently represents fewer problems for the child than inflectional markings, as they are found in

14

Two First Languages

German; see chapter 7. Similarly, in acquiring gender assignment systems, children seem to fare better when the required operation is formally "clear"; see chapter 8. Interestingly enough, this is a more important factor than semantic transparency in assigning gender. Not only "clearness", but also "locality" is found to be a crucial factor; i.e. gender agreement between adjacent elements occurs earlier than gender assignment across various elements of the paradigm (N, Adj, Det, etc.) The conclusion which can be drawn from such findings is that there exist language-specific acquisitional patterns which are not determined by functional properties of the elements acquired but by their formal properties. It is in this sense, as well, that we study the role of grammar for language acquisition, in addition to searching for evidence of parameter-setting, etc. And I believe that bilingual first language acquisition is a particularly good test case for such hypotheses; see also 2.3, below. It goes without saying that although the focus of our research lies in formal properties of language, other factors are not totally ignored. Otherwise, it would hardly be possible to evaluate the relevance of the notion of "grammaticization" for early language acquisition. In the development of temporal expressions, for example, semantic characteristics of the verbs, thematic roles, etc. do come into play; see chapter 5. Conceptual and cognitive complexity need also to be taken into account as possibly determining the course of acquisition; see chapters 5 and 6.

2.2. Maturation or violation of UG principles? So far, I have been concerned mainly with those aspects of our research program which are related to the weak version of the continuity assumption, focusing on formal properties of language and, more specifically, on the grammar underlying early language use. If we succeed in demonstrating that grammatical knowledge is indeed available from early on, the question still remains what the grammar of the child might possibly look like. Phrased differently, one would like to know, among other things, whether child grammars are "possible grammars", as defined by UG.

At first sight, it seems to be fairly obvious that early child language cannot be explained by grammars which fall within the range of what is permitted by UG. Early "telegraphic speech" lacks many elements which are obligatory in adult language: subjects, objects, prepositions, articles, etc. And it apparently violates a number of principles, e.g. the theta criterion, the case filter, binding conditions; see Felix (1988) for a list of alleged violations and a discussion of the theoretical problems involved. Although some authors have tried to account for these particularities by means of grammatical arguments, e.g. Hyams (1986) for null subjects, most problems remain unsolved, including the majority of those for which such explanations have been suggested; see chapter 9.

Meisel: Grammatical Development

15

But we are not left with a choice only between UG or no UG. As mentioned above, see section 1, various authors, among them Felix (1984, 1987, 1988) and Borer & Wexler (1987), propose that UG itself is the object of maturation. This is to say that principles of UG are not all available for the child during early phases; rather, they emerge one after the other. Initially, child language cannot be explained entirely in terms of UG, but the child's grammar is increasingly constrained by UG. Assuming this perspective, the crucial problem quite obviously is to decide what determines the order of emergence of UG principles. One possibility, suggested by Felix (1988:3), is that 'principles of UG are associated with a biologically determined maturational schedule which makes them emerge in a specific temporal order." While Felix (1988) is probably right in observing that "In the domain of physical development

maturation seems to be the rule

rather than the exception" and that a maturationist approach therefore gains a certain plausibility, the problem nevertheless remains that the extralinguistic maturational schedule needs to be justified on the basis of independent empirical and theoretical evidence. And for the time being, the available evidence of this kind is not yet convincing, to say the least. Given this state of affairs, I believe that it is preferable to try to work with a set of hypotheses which can do without additional assumptions about a biologically defined maturational schedule. Only if this attempt fails, would I want to consider the maturationist approach. Occam's Razor again! Such a more parsimonious model of early grammatical development can be outlined on the basis of suggestions made by Radford (1986) and others, e.g. Guilfoyle & Noonan (1988). According to this, the main difference between early grammars and adult grammars is that the former lack functional categories, i.e. INFL, COMP, and possibly DET and KASE. The structure of early utterances thus resembles that of so-called Small Clauses (SC) in adult language. This amounts to saying that case marking, overt subjects, embedded clauses, verb second phenomena, preposed wh-phrases, agreement markings, etc. cannot appear as long as the prerequisites for certain grammatical structures and operations are not yet met. This again implies that although child utterances, on the surface, apparently do not conform to requirements of UG, it does not really make sense to classify such phenomena as Violations" of UG principles. As long as the conditions for the application of these principles are not fulfilled, the particularities of early language are the result of non-application and not of violation of principles. And this is not merely theory-dependent quibbling with words, for the two alternative accounts of the facts make different predictions for the process of grammatical development. The SC-hypothesis does not have to explain the awakening of dormant universal principles. But it needs to make plausible why functional categories are not used right from the beginning and how the conditions for the application of UG principles are eventually realized. The scenario for early grammatical development which emerges if one follows these ideas looks approximately as follows: Children begin by learning lexical elements which are stressed and phonologically salient and which, for obvious reasons, are initially only referential

16

Two First Languages

expressions; see also Nishigauchi & Roeper (1987). They do not have to "learn1 properties of syntactic categories, since these, as well as X-bar theory, are part of UG. But they do have to discover, on the basis of the available input, in which way specific lexical elements are assigned to the various categories. This may possibly be achieved by means of strategies like semantic bootstrapping (Pinker, 1984). At this point of development, one should expect to find miscategorizations, and that functional categories are not yet filled at all. But the principles of Xbar syntax should already allow the child to construct maximal projections of categories like N and V. Note, however, that technically speaking the structures of child utterances are not yet sentences, if we define a sentence as an IP, i.e. as a maximal projection of INFL. Further developments are claimed to be lexically driven. As the child acquires more lexical items, more complex structures are created to which more universal principles can apply. Eventually, grammatical morphemes are also discovered, and they are then assigned to functional categories. This can obviously only be a rough sketch of how one might account for apparent violations of UG principles in early grammars. But it should suffice to show that it is an idea worth further thought. We intend to examine these possibilities in much more detail, and we offer some preliminary results in this book; see chapters 7 and 9. Let me add a final remark to this point. I have, so far, dealt with approaches to language acquisition according to which one does not have to assume that UG principles are violated by early grammars. From this, however, it does not necessarily follow that children cannot violate these principles in language use. In other words, if there exists an option between a grammatical and a pragmatic mode of processing, and if the two modes compete or cooperate in actual language use, see section 1 above, and if mechanisms of language use, too, intervene in determining the nature of children's speech, one must ask whether pragmatic strategies cannot occasionally override grammatical principles. Although this is not an orthodox assumption within Generative Grammar, it is not implausible to suspect that a pragmatic solution to a coding problem will be preferred if it can reduce the performative complexity of the task, even if the grammatical constraints do not permit such an option. And if this is indeed a possibility, it is likely to happen more frequently during early phases than later on when the operations necessary for the use of grammar have been habitualized. This idea clearly needs to be elaborated more carefully. Most importantly, pragmatically motivated violations of grammatical principles need to be constrained, too, by explicitly formulated restrictions, unless one wants to allow for an "anything goes" option which would dramatically weaken the entire argumentation concerning grammatical development. But although this is a serious problem, it should not prevent us from investigating such a possibilty. Some first ideas on this topic are presented in chapter 9.

Meisel: Grammatical Development

17

2.3. Acquiring two first languages simultaneously. In the preceding sections, I have tried to sketch our research program, which is concerned with early phases in the acquisition of grammar, to make explicit the motivation for the specific choice of guiding questions, and to emphasize a few points which our investigation is focusing on. Choosing a not so serious way of phrasing it, one might say that we are particularly interested in the role of grammar in grammatical development. This implies that one needs to make every effort possible to isolate this variable, "form of grammatical coding*, in order to determine what it can contribute to an explanation of language acquisition. And it appears that data from bilingual first language acquisition are better suited than monolingual data for this kind of research, since a number of factors, especially general cognitive development, personality, etc. are invariable or can be controlled more easily. One has to do with one personality, one mind, etc., but with two grammars. The child who acquires two languages simultaneously affords a valuable opportunity for the study of this theoretical controversy since such a child is his own control for cognitive and social development: will the stages of acquisition be the same for the two languages under these circumstances, or are there characteristic differences between the two languages? (Levelt et al., 1981:8) The significance of the answers to such questions will depend, however, on whether there exist or not qualitative differences between the acquisitional patterns found for a specific language in bilinguals, as compared to monolingual acquisition of the same language. It is therefore necessary to contrast our results with findings from research on monolingals. Whenever possible, this is done in each of chapters 5 through 9. But the necessary information about monolingual first language development is not always available, especially not for French which is not well studied, as far as early acquisitional problems are concerned. And frequently one has to compare one's findings with those of a number of different studies in which different theories, methods, and terminologies are used. In order to facilitate this task, and also for the convenience of the readers who are not familiar with the relevant literature on the acquisition of both German and French, chapters 2 and 3 summarize the results of a considerable number of previously published works. In doing so, an attempt has been made to define developmental sequences for grammatical phenomena as they emerge in the speech of monolingual children. These sequences had to be defined in terms of surface phenomena, for otherwise the questions pursued here would have had to be answered beforehand. As will become apparent in the following chapters, we come to the conclusion that bilingual first language acquisition does not differ in substantial ways from monolingual development. But there is some evidence that bilingual speech exhibits less variation than that of monolinguals in each language; see Meisel (1986) for more details. It appears, in fact, that in these cases

18

Two First Languages

bilinguals succeed more easily than monolinguals in decoding the language-specific coding systems and the underlying grammatical principles. At first sight, this is a surprising result in view of the fact that these children have to "crack the codes" of two different systems simultaneously. I would like to suggest an explanation which is again based on Givon's (1979) distinction between two modes of language processing. For if the learner, like the adult speaker, can choose between grammatical and pragmatic solutions, it is the task itself, i.e. the necessity to discover the regularities of more than one system, which strongly favors the grammatical mode. The hypothesis thus is that bilinguals tend to focus more on formal aspects of language and are therefore able to acquire certain grammatical constructions faster and with fewer errors than many or most monolinguals. A number of findings presented in this volume lend preliminary support to this hypothesis, although, for the time being, it is still rather speculative and needs further corroboration. 3. SPECIFIC AREAS OF GRAMMAR STUDIED.

To conclude, I want to comment briefly on the choice of grammatical phenomena which are discussed in this volume. The areas of grammar studied have been selected in such a way as to provide evidence in support of or against the hypotheses developed above, in particular the grammaticization hypothesis. Some means of expression are regarded as being functionally more transparent than others. Occasionally, pragmatic and grammatical functions seem to merge. And in some instances, no functional motivation whatsoever is recognizable. If functionalist approaches to language acquisition are correct, one should find that the latter emerge later than the former and that they are more difficult to use for the child. One problem area where grammaticization appears to be most likely to occur is the expression of tense, aspect, and modality (TMA). It is frequently claimed that children are able to express aspect before tense and that early uses of verb morphology depend on the semantic values of the verbs used; see Meisel (1985) for a summary of the literature. S. Schlyter (chapter 5) concludes that our data confirm such predictions to a large extent, although corrections and additions need to me made. At the same time, however, she finds that language-specific ways of coding these functions determine not only which forms are acquired first, they also give the result that certain tenses are used more frequently than others. This demonstrates again the advantage of bilingual studies. A comparison of the developments in both languages shows that in French, past participle forms emerge early, but not in German where the children express similar functions by means of adverbiale or verb particles. And this pattern continues to show up during later phases: compound tenses (Aux+past participle) appear earlier in French than in German. Note that this raises an interesting question: is it only the form which emerges first in one language, or do children express certain

Meisel: Grammatical Development

19

concepts earlier (or only) in one language? S. Schlyter argues that the availability of a formal device may indeed enable the child to express functional values not accessible when communicating in the other language. Prepositions, too, represent a promising case to test our hypotheses. They serve as case markings and to express grammatical relations in general. But prepositions are also semantically and syntactically autonomous lexical elements. It seems that the latter kind is acquired earlier, but there is no evidence which would indicate that grammatical uses develop out of these earlier ones. More importantly, S. Klinge (chapter 6) finds that they are not subject to the same kinds of semantic processes (e.g. overgeneralizations) as, for example, locative prepositions. Such results, thus, seem to confirm our claim that the set of syntactic elements constitute objects in their own right for learning processes. As for case markings and word order regularities, it is generally assumed that they cooperate in the expression of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic functions. Approaches based on the semantic primacy hypothesis predict that children will first develop something which resembles an ergative system, i.e. that they initially mark thematic roles rather than syntactic relations; and this should first be done by means of positional coding. T. Parodi (chapter 7) shows that this prediction is not confirmed. But she does find evidence that some children at least may use early inflectional markings to express the thematic role "theme". She also gives counterevidence to the claim (see Clahsen, 1986b) that more flexibility in word order results in a functionally motivated need for additional markings and therefore triggers the development of the inflectional system. The fact that language-specific word order patterns emerge fairly early strongly supports the role of grammar as a crucial factor determining the underlying logic of development. This is further corroborated by the observation that these patterns appear simultaneously with inflectional markings, most notably with the [±finite] distinction coded on verbs; see also chapter 9. A particularly strong case in support of the claim that formal criteria are crucial in language acquisition is made by the analysis of gender assignment. The gender system, especially the three-fold distinction in German, is functionally not transparent, to say the least. Learners have to rely on phonological, as well as on morphological and on semantic clues in order to discover the underlying regularities. The study presented by N. Müller (chapter 8) clearly shows that there is no primacy of semantic learning, not even where transparency exists, as in the case of natural gender. Form-oriented learning is observed at least as early as are semantic strategies of learning. As far as gender agreement is concerned, it may, in fact, depend on the internal structure of the NP. The last topic dealt with in this volume is the development of subject-verb agreement (chapter 9). It is closely connected with the other issues discussed here, for it hinges on the assumption that there do exist "verbs" and "subjects" as grammatical categories, as well as on the condition that the alleged agreement markings do indeed express syntactic relations. Verbs and

20

Two First Languages

nouns are defined on the basis of their formal properties, including those analyzed in the other chapters, i.e. tense marking and government relationships, case and gender markings, etc. The existence of subjects depends, among other things, on the presence of the functional category INFL; see also chapter 7. The analysis of these phenomena allows us to conclude that as soon as personal inflection morphemes appear on verbs, they function as grammatical codings of agreement. On the other hand, it also becomes apparent that child utterances do not always conform to grammatical principles. Omissions of normally obligatory elements, for example, need not be licensed by the grammar if certain contextual and pragmatic conditions are met. In sum, the results of the analyses presented in this volume indicate that grammatical principles determine in significant ways the logic of early language development. Empirical and theoretical evidence is given to the effect that universal principles, the setting of parameters defined by UQ, formal aspects of language-specific structures, and mechanisms of language processing shape early language. Yet there is little evidence for grammaticization. Rather, grammatical and pragmatic principles seem to interact in a complex fashion from very early on. But nevertheless, grammatical devices which are semantically and pragmatically not transparent, are not necessarily acquired late. They may, in fact, emerge quite early, and their development can be fast and almost free of errors. Let me simply add that a number of specific questions concerning bilingual language use are not dealt with in this volume, e.g. whether the two grammatical competences develop as separate systems or whether the children have to pass through a phase of "one grammatical system" (Volterra & Taeschner, 1978), or problems related to code-switching, mixing, etc. These issues deserve to be studied independently; see Schlyter (1987b) and Meisel (1989,1990).

4. FOOTNOTES. 1. I am aware of the fact that this distinction between a stronger and a weaker version of the continuity hypothesis is not a very orthodox position. I nevertheless want to maintain it. The reason is that both versions do indeed make claims concerning the continuity of grammatical development. The stronger one reflects a discussion among those who work within one version of a theory of UG. The weaker one refers to arguments developed by functionalist approaches to language and language acquisition.

CHAPTER 2

THE ACQUISITION OF MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX IN GERMAN CHILD LANGUAGE

Andreas Ceilings

24

Two First Languages

0. INTRODUCTION.

This chapter is aimed at the presentation of a brief survey of some major developmental stages in the acquisition of German. It mainly deals with early childhood ranging from about one year up to three and a half years. The developmental chart outlined here primarily refers to "profile analysis" as described by Clahsen (1986a, 1988a, 1988e). "Profile analysis' is the term given to a chart that provides a generalized view of first language acquisition based upon all the available research carried out on German ; though detailed, it is rather a preliminary than an overall description of child grammar. In the following, attention will be firstly directed to five significant stages the German child passes through in acquiring some of the most important morphosyntactic features of his/her target language. Each stage will be briefly described, examples will be included, if necessary. In the second part of this chapter I shall look at the acquisition of some linguistic phenomena that have been excluded from "profile analysis", namely gender and number. 1. FIVE STAGES IN THE GRAMMATICAL ACQUISITION OF GERMAN (L1).

1.0. Quantitative aspects.

The description of the five major stages in the grammatical acquisition of German will focus on qualitative aspects. This is not meant to neglect the other side of the coin, namely quantity based on children's mean length of utterance (MLU), but rather to express to which side priority should be given. The reasons for this are twofold: in the first instance, there is still a considerable lack of sufficient and representative data. In particular only those studies that have been carried out during the last fifteen years, pay attention to quantity; however, they mostly use different procedures, some referring to morphemes, others to words. Moreover only a few researchers (see Grimm, 1973; Clahsen, 1982b) concentrate on all of the five developmental stages. Another problem concerns the fact that the data collected on quantitative aspects cannot serve as a reliable pattern that represents the German population in general. Secondly, statements on quantity hardly display which developments have taken place in child language. Consider, for instance, the verb moving from sentence-final to sentencesecond position in stage IV. Since the child already produces multi-word utterances, there will not (necessarily) be an increase of utterance length. Thus, the progress the child makes will not become visible if the focus, in research, is on quantity rather than on quality. Quantitative aspects, however, should not be ignored but regarded as an additional source of information in assessing the child's development.

Callings: Acquisition of German

25

Consider therefore the following table designed to give the reader an impression of the extent in which mean length of utterance, based on words only, increases through the

five

developmental stages. Table 1 :

Mean Lenoth of Utterance throuah the five stages of the acquisition of German

stage

mean length of utterance (MLU)

I II III IV V

= 1.0 1.0-2.0 2.0 - 3.0 3.0 - 4.0 >4.0

1.1. Stage I. The first stage is approximately passed through from age 1 ;0 to age 1 ;6. It should be noted, however, that this statement, and the following ones on age are subject to individual variation and are consequently only very rough estimations. 1.1.1. (Non)syntactic Categories. The Child grammar, here, basically consists of three categories: - so-called simple nouns lacking specifiers and determiners, e.g. Mann 'man' - verbal elements, mainly mere prefixes such as weg 'away', ab Off' - deictic elements such as the highly frequent adverb da 'there' Apart from traditional word categories like these, it has also been found that children at this stage use 'paraverbal elements', such as aaa, i.e. elements that do not belong to the syntactic categories of adult language. "Paraverbal elements", especially words, can already express sentence meaning (as illustrated in (1)2), even when being uttered singly; that is why this stage may be either called the one word stage or one sentence stage. (1)

auf x open x (J. wants to open a purse)

J

1.1.2. Interrogation and negation. Children are not only capable of producing utterances bearing a declarative status but also questions and negations. Questions do not reveal any syntactic rule operating on them, rather a complete dependence on intonation, i.e. questions are simply differentiated from statements by a change of intonation. Negation, on the other hand, is indicated by the isolated use of nein 'no' only.

26

Two First Languages

(2)

nein (Mutter: Das möchtest du gerne ansehen? ) 'no' (Mother: you would like to look at this? )

J

1.1.3. End of Stage I. The crucial question is how the child progresses from stage I to stage II or, in other words, what causes the child to utter more than one element. There are three characteristics marking the end of the first stage: - sequences; see Anders (1980) - reduplications; see Bloom (1973) - paraverbal elements in combination with words. Each of the three characteristics demonstrates the child's take-off in developing his/her ability to combine different types of single words, enabling him/her to establish structured utterances containing more than just one word. 1.2. Stage II. Most children reach stage II at age 1 ;6 and leave it at age 2;0. Child grammar at this stage can be characterized by the predominate use of so-called "content words" (nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives) and the almost entire absence of so-called "function words" (articles, auxiliaries, copulas, prepositions). For this reason researchers have often compared it with "telegraphic speech". 1.2.1. Syntactic categories. - nominal phrases, either utilized as pronouns, or as nouns in combination with the indefinite or definite article (without gender and case), or with adjectives. - adverbial phrases appearing either as simple adverbs (chiefly local adverbs, e.g. hier 'here') or less frequently as (incomplete) prepositional phrases (e.g. in schrank 'in cupboard', see (3d)). - verbal phrases taking the form of simple verbs (gehen 'go') predicative adjectives (schön 'nice'), or prefix verbs (aufmachen 'upmake'(= open)). 1.2.2. Basic utterances. It is not only the syntactic categories that are fairly basic but also the ways in which they are combined. The utterances rarely comprise more than two elements and do not yet follow German word order. It has been shown that word order at this stage follows a set of universal semantico—syntactic modes of construction. According to Foss & Hakes (1978) this set, which can also be found in German child language, is fixed and includes seven specific structures based both on semantics and syntax, see (3) for illustration.

Callings: Acquisition of German (3)

a. nomination rudi das 'rudithis' (=This is R.) b. actor action schinken aufessen 'ham eaten' (=The dogs have eaten the ham.) c. object location hier tisch 'here table' (=Here is a table.) d. action location in schrank stellen 'in cupboard put' (D. is putting the train into the cupboard.) e. attribution putt schaukel 'broken swing' (=The swing is broken.) f. possession titti fell 'teddy bear fur' (=The teddy bear's fur is soft.) a. request wasser haben 'water have' (D. wants water.)

27

D

D

J

D

M

M

D

1.2.3. Verb placement and verb inflection. Taking a closer look at the placement of verbal and nominal elements, one will notice that the child does not employ all of the logically possible patterns. Instead, preverbal subject position can be observed, while the object of a sentence can be found both pre- and postverbally. Clahsen argues that the child uses word order in surface structure to distinguish the different arguments a verb can take: the regular sentence schema will therefore be "subject before verb". In this way the child uses one of the options standard German offers to distinguish the arguments of a verb; in adult language other options like subject-verbagreement or case morphology, for instance, are available that serve this purpose much better. The child has not access to them yet and is bound to rely on word order only. As for the verbal elements, certain regularities have been found, too. Though verb placement generally seems to be variable, a predominant use of verb-final patterns can be noted, e.g. in Clahsen's study (1982b), about 70% of all utterances containing a verbal element have the verb at the end, e.g. (3b,3d,3g).

28

Two First Languages With regard to verb inflection, the child uses three different markings (flexives): -t, -n, and

-0. Mills (1985) considers the particular choice of any of these to depend on the child 's intake of parental speech: -n is believed to be frequently used by adults because they do "syntactic baby talk in which no modal or auxiliary is used but the main verb in infinitive form" (153); -t, on the other hand, is supposed to reflect a "part of a set formula such as schmeckt from es schmeckt 'it tastes good' (153). The latter explanation especially is in serious doubt when confronted with utterances like (4). It does not seem to be plausible here that the child should have reduced a "set formula", since no such formula can be quoted in adult language. (4)

umkippt Overtip' (A cup of cocoa is tipping over.)

J

The view Clahsen puts forward might enhance our understanding of the data. In his opinion, the choice of any of the formatives depends highly on semantic aspects, mainly on the semantic transitivity of an utterance. This means, none of the formatives encodes specific grammatical dimensions of the subject yet; they rather indicate the degree of transitivity a sentence has. According to Hopper & Thompson (1980), the transitivity of a predicate-argument structure is determined by certain features, such as animacy, number of arguments, thematic role, etc. Clahsen believes that the flexive -t is typically chosen if an utterance can be classified as "intransitive", if it, for example, lacks an animate, agentive argument (see (4)). -0 and -n, on the other hand, are not in opposition to -t and may equally well show up in transitive and intransitive constructions. In addition, no opposition can be made out between the usage of -0 and -n. They are used in free variation. Quantitative differences in the use of -n versus -0 are seen as due to individual preferences some children have. In comparison with Mills, Clahsen's line of explanation seems to be more convincing; still there remain some doubts, especially when one considers that the flexive -t is not in clear opposition to the flexives -0 and -n. Clahsen settles this question by regarding the flexive -n as a default form, whereas -0 is supposed to occur whenever the verb is uninflected. This implies, nevertheless, that non-transitivity is not systematically encoded. Another regularity concerns the interaction of verb placement and verb inflection. Verbal elements being infinite (flexive -n), or simply bearing the stem (flexive -0), are preferably placed in final position (3d), whereas verbal elements having the flexive -t, get into either first or second position (5). (5)

rausholt hier Outpick here' (M. picks kricks out of the cupboard.)

M

Callings: Acquisition of German

29

Verbal elements are concerned once more when one considers how the child handles prefix verbs. Again a systematic choice is being made in that only the following two options are exercised; (6a) is used more frequently. (6)

a. ...PrV purzel pierkorb rausräum 'purzel paper basket clear' (Looking at a picture book, M. points to a dog (= Purzel) who has cleared out the paper basket.) b. ...PrV.. raustun das Outdo that' (D. wants to take out the puzzle again.)

M

D

Clahsen believes that the child, at this stage, treats prefix verbs just like ordinary verbs, neither assigning argument status to prefixes nor integrating them into the subcategorization frame a specific verb has. Consequently prefix verbs that should be separated do not get separated. 1.2.4. Interrogation and negation. Questions are still marked by intonation only. Two different types of questions can be distinguished: children produce both alternative questions (7a) demanding a positive or negative answer, and questions for information typically opened by a question word (7b). Note that placing the question word at the very beginning of the utterance is correct right away. (7)

a. autos kipp um? 'cars turn over' (=Do the cars overturn?)

M

b. wo mathias? 'where Mathias?' (D. is looking for Mathias.)

D

There is progress concerning negation, too. First the inventory of negation words is extended by nicht 'not'. Negators seem to have no fixed position yet, therefore they come after (8a) or before (8b) the element which is negated. (8)

a. paßt nicht 'fit not' (=lt does not fit.)

M

b. das nich fahr 'that not drive' (=A toy car does not move.)

M

30

Two First Languages

Clahsen (1988b) argues that even at this stage certain characteristic patterns in the placement of the negator can be found, nicht 'not' never shows up in positions where nein 'no' appears, i.e. nicht 'not' takes a VP-external position but does not take an utterance-external position. The latter position is restricted to nein 'no'. Another characteristic is that the child already has access to both of the possibilities standard German displays when it comes to the pre- vs. postverbal arrangement of nicht 'not'. The child utilizes pre- and postverbal negation favoring the postverbal, but does not yet meet the specific contextual restrictions of standard German (see stage III). 1.3. Stage III. Stage III, which the child goes through between age 2;0 and about age 2;6, can be seen as a transitional phase in that major grammatical changes do not occur. There is a significant increase in mean length of utterance, though; children produce more three- and multi-word utterances than one- and two-word utterances together. This is based upon a consolidation of the structures the child acquired in the stage before. This consolidation, however, does not only affect quantity; many utterances now contain two or even more complements (9) but have typically not more than one object. Note that adverbs at this stage can still not be placed sentence-internally but appear either in first or second position. (9)

hier, hier die schere hat Julia 'here, here the scissors have Julia' (Julia has the scissors.)

M

Clahsen characterizes the child's attitude towards his/her target language as "input orientated" in stage III. For the first time attention is lavished on the specific syntactic restrictions of German (e.g., see negation 1.3.4.). Such restrictions, however, are not simply copied, but rather adapted to the very level child grammar has reached so far; this still brings about defective utterances. In particular, the child's view on the target language at this point can be exemplified by verb placement. 1.3.1. Verb placement. Just as in stage II, simple finite verbs can appear both in second and final position; verbal elements containing non-finite parts, on the other hand, are found no more in second position but in sentence-final position only; see (10) for illustration. (10)

da die windel um 'there the nappy around' (The nappy is around the doll.)

J

Callings: Acquisition of German

31

Standard German main clauses require sentence-second position for the finite verb, and sentence-final position for the non-finite verbal element. There is no syntactic context that demands sentence-second position for non-finite verbal elements. So the child restricts itself to placing verbal elements only in those positions that are possible in German. Nevertheless, the output does not fully correspond to standard German; to be precise, putting inflected verbs in sentence—final position is possible only in embedded clauses, a restriction the child sometimes violates in main clauses (11). Note that examples such as (11) are rare in stage III. (11)

damännleinfehjt 'there little man miss' (A little man is missing there.)

D

1.3.2. Omissions. For the first time ever the child uses discontinuous verbal elements, such as auxiliaries, modal verbs, and copulas. This does not imply that s/he employs them adequately. On the contrary, in most structures, either the finite or the non-finite part is omitted (12). In case both parts are present, they are typically not separated if a complement is there or not (13). (12)

(13)

a. du muß eine brücke 'you must a bridge' (=You must (make) a bridge.)

D

b. da Scheiben nitten 'there slices cut' (=There I (have) cut some slices.)

D

da julia auch sand reintut 'there Julia also sand input' (Julia puts sand in there as well.)

M

Generally, omissions are still quite frequent and concern not only verbal elements but also subjects, prepositions, and articles. Note that it may cause some problems to say for sure if direct objects have been omitted, due to the fact that quite a few verbs can be used transitively and intransitively (e.g. kochen 'cook'). Case morphology is hardly present, and if so, the -s suffix of the genitive case is the only indication. The -s suffix may regularly appear in the possessive case, then being suffixed to the noun but not to the article or possessive pronoun (14). (14)

das ist Julias teddy 'that is Julia's teddy'

M

According to Mills (1985), the child does not mark any other word but the noun with the -s suffix before reaching the age of six.

32

Two First Languages

1.3.3. Verb inflection. The stage II system loses its influence in that the child no longer firmly holds on to his/her orientation towards semantics. There are a few indications that suggest such a conclusion: - the child not only enlarges its inventory of verb flexives by the flexive -e but also uses it in environments that do not necessarily demand it and can just do with the flexive -0 (15). The child obviously feels a certain urge for overt marking. (15)

ich kanne Ί can' (= I can do that.)

M

- despite the fact that a lot of overgeneralizations can still be found, the flexive -n hardly appears in a third person singular context anymore. 1.3.4. Interrogation and negation. With regard to interrogation, no qualitative changes take place; the only device the child has to mark a question remains the alternation of intonation. Statements about the stage II negation system also hold for stage III. A few qualitative differences in the employment of pre- versus postverbal negation have still to be pointed out. Distributional analyses show not only a preference for postverbal negation but also different modes of usage. Typically, the child places nicht 'not' postverballv when dealing with finite verbs and modals (16a), whereas greverbal negation correlates highly with the use of infinite verbs (16b). (16)

a. Julia darf nich mit 'Julia must not with' (J. must not take part in the game.)

M

b. das nich fahr 'that not drive' (= A toy car does not move)

M

c. kann nich fahrn mehr 'cannot drive anymore' (=The bulldozer cannot move anymore.)

M

Furthermore, it is only preverbal negation that allows the negation word to get detached from the verb. Postverbal negation, however, at this stage asks for a close tie between the negation word and the verb, i.e. the negator is put right after the verb even if standard German constraints are violated, as in (16c) which would require sentence-internal placement of the complement.

Callings: Acquisition of German

33

1.4. Stage IV. Along the developmental scale presented here, stage IV means more than just the next stage in acquiring the target language. It is a sort of turning-point that enables the child to fulfil all of the requirements concerning word order in standard German main clauses. 1.4.1. Word order. Probably the most important step towards adult grammar is taken when the notion of finiteness is fully established. Up to stage IV, the child has not yet mastered the full morphological paradigm of verb inflection, i.e. verbal elements have neither been marked consistently nor on syntactic grounds only; moreover the paradigm has not been fully specified. As has been observed, this changes when the child reaches stage IV at about age 2;6 to 3;0. With the verb flexives -0, -e, -t, and -n now available, only one flexive, -st (2nd person singular), has still to be acquired. This happens now and has an impact on both verb inflection and verb placement. On the one hand, the child never overgeneralizes his/her latest flexive, -st, nor does s/he overgeneralize any other verb flexive to a significant extent anymore. On the other hand, almost all finite verbs now occur in sentence-second position. Evidently this observation cannot be attributed to a mere increase of mean length of utterance as Mills (1985:162) claims. It is rather the acquisition of -st that triggers the shift from predominantly verb final to verb second patterns. Their frequency rises from some 40% to 90% within an exceedingly short time, approximately one month. This holds equally for discontinuous word order having the finite part in sentence-second position (see 17). (17)

a. ich will nich so fahren lassen Ί want not this way go let' (D. does not want his train to go this way)

D

b. ich kann schon lesen Ί can already read'

M

c. hier neidet finger ab 'here cut finger off' (= You can cut off a finger with the scissors)

M

d. ich hab doch schon gegessen Ί have but already eaten' (=But I have already eaten.)

D

Parallel to the headway the child makes concerning verb inflection, s/he also advances when it comes to the explicit realization of the subject. The subject of a sentence now becomes obligatory, depending no longer on semantic or pragmatic features the child may ascribe to a specific utterance.

34

Two First Languages

Acquiring sentence-second position for finite verbal elements implies more than just consistently fronting the verb in declarative subject verb utterances. It also means paying attention to the syntactic constraints of standard German when different or more complex structures are involved. There are two other types of utterances where the speaker must conform to verb- second placement. In case a complement takes the first position in a sentence, verb-second placement must be maintained (18). (18)

a. da is ein hase tot 'there is a hare dead' (A dead hare is there.)

D

b. jetzt kletter ich 'now climb Γ (Now I am climbing.)

M

c. vier hefte hab ich 'four exercise books have Γ (I have got four exercise books.)

M

The second type of utterance concerns questions that are marked syntactically. Here, standard German demands subject verb inversion whether or not a question word is present, in other words, if the speaker intends a so-called alternative question or a question for information. In stage IV, then, the child being capable of putting finite verbs in second position, s/he can handle any relevant context and has no difficulty in employing the rule for interrogative utterances, too

(19). (19)

a. wo is mathias? 'where is Mathias?'

D

b. und warum essen die stroh? 'and why eat they straw?' (=And why do they eat straw?)

D

Evidently one may conclude that inverting subject and verb in questions is not acquired by a separate rule; it is rather just a special case of the more general rule of fronting the finite verb. This seems to be even more true when one notes that acquiring the verb-second rule and inverting subject and verb in questions happen simultaneously. This conclusion will also be preferred when compared with the approach Wode (1971) takes. The author claims that subject-verb inversion has to be learned separately, first occuring with alternative questions, then also with questions for information; as soon as interrogative pronouns other than wo 'where' show up, "the inversion rule appears to have been fully learned" (Wode, as quoted by Mills 1985:164). The crucial question unanswered here is: why should four rules be

Collings: Acquisition of German

35

learned if all of them deal with the same thing, namely the verb taking sentence-second position, i.e. one rule each for verb-second placement in subject-verb utterances, utterances having a topicalized complement, alternative questions, and interrogative utterances

opened by a

question word. Apart from that it appears to be far-fetched that verb second placement in questions for information should depend in any way on the emergence of question words other than wo 'where'. If a separate rule had to be learned, it would be more plausible to relate its acquisition to any possible interrogative pronoun. When acquiring word order, the child does not get closer to the target language by verb placement only but also by adverb placement. Recalling that adverbs were put either in first or second position in the previous stages, progess can be illustrated by the following examples (20). (20)

a. will das so machen 'want it this way make' (=1 want to do it this way.)

D

b. ich kann besser ein clown mach Ί can better a clown make' (=1 can better make a clown.)

M

Here, the adverbs appear in sentence-internal position right between the verb and object. Such an arrangement requires splitting up a unit authors like Slobin (1982b) have termed 'perceptual gestalt", i.e. elements like the verb and the object are believed to make up a single semantic unit. The child preferably groups elements of a semantic unit together as closely as possible. If such a unit gets broken up, e.g. by an internally placed adverb, language processing becomes much more difficult. The reason is that the child, then, is bound to concentrate on syntactic restrictions only. A similar strategy is required when the child moves the finite verbal element to sentencesecond position: if discontinuous verbal elements are concerned, e.g. a verbal element and its prefix, they also have to be separated even though they may be semantically related. In stage IV the child is prepared to split up semantic units, an observation that accounts for the parallelism in acquiring both correct verb and adverb placement. 1.4.2. Negation. The changes that have been considered so far primarily refer to word order but affect negation too. This is due to the fact that acquiring the morphological paradigm of subjectverb agreement and the ability to differentiate finite verbs from non-finite verbs, triggers the correct placement of the negation word in main clauses, i.e. after the finite verb. Clahsen (1988b) hypothesizes that in stage IV the child is prepared to reanalyze postverballv negated utterances as derived from underlying greverbally negated utterances because s/he now knows that once the verb movement rule is employed, the negation word no longer appears before the finite verb. Consequently the child drops preverbal negation completely and restricts himself/herself to postverbal negation only, which evokes well-formed utterances like (21 a). In addition the child

36

Two First Languages

also notes the specific German constraint when it comes to separating the negator from the finite verb in case of the involvement of a sentence-internal complement (21 b). (21)

a. die Julia darf nich drangehen 'the Julia must not aboutgo' (Julia must not touch the camera.) b. ich kenn das doch nich Ί know that but not' (=But I do not know that.)

M

J

1.4.3. Omissions. There is also a noticeable decline in the omission of function words. In most cases grammatical elements like copulas, prepositions, and articles are now present; elements like these basically have a purely syntactic status and share a certain degree of semantic redundancy. The child, nevertheless, feels the necessity to express them which can be shown by the following examples. (22)

a. das is doch eine hexe 'that is but a witch' (=But that is a witch.)

M

b. da kann man mit den auto hinfahr 'there can you with the car to-go' (=You can go there by car.)

M

c. das meer (Mutter: was ist das denn? ) 'the sea' (Mother: so what is it? )

M

1.4.4. Case morphology. If articles and prepositions now regularly appear, markers of case morphology other than the nominal suffix ^s for the genitive case (see stage III) might be expected. The actual state of affairs is a bit different though: during the previous stages the child did not really use articles as in standard German. They were rather precursor forms not phonologically distinguished, e.g. de for all definite articles and 'n for indefinite ones. In stage IV the child has the full paradigm of (definite) articles: die for feminine and plural, das for neuter, and der for masculine. Thus, the availability of the definite/indefinite paradigm seems to be a prerequisite for the establishment of the case paradigm. As for the morphological cases, dative and accusative forms have rarely been found in stage IV; rather the child overgeneralizes the nominative (23). (23)

a. das sag ich die mama 'that say I the mummy' (=l tell mummy about it.)

M

Callings: Acquisition of German

37

b. hab der keubeu noch nich auf 'have the cowboy yet not on' (=1 have not put on my cowboy hat yet.)

D

Mills (1985), however, referring to findings by Scupin & Scupin (1907; 1910) and Stern & Stern (1907) points out that accusative and nominative might be distinguished before articles are used regularly - through the adequate usage of adjective endings. In the absence of more data the examples given (e.g. (24)) still seem to be rare. (24)

großen ball sehen 'big ball see' (-I want to see the big ball.)

(Scupin)

In addition, Mills draws attention to some data collected by both of the above authors as well as by Grimm (1973) which suggest that the adjective is marked for accusative case too where the indefinite article still appears in the nominative. Such evidence cannot be evaluated yet. At present, examples like these can either be attributed to individual differences or to a systematic approach to the acquisition of case. The latter hypothesis might be more appealing because of the fact that Clahsen's data also contain such examples as (25). (25)

ich hab auch ein schätzen fisch have also a black fish'

D

With regard to accusative forms, one major objection to Mills' hypothesis must be pointed out: das for neuter nominative cannot be distinguished from das neuter accusative, just as die feminine nominative cannot be distinguished from die feminine accusative because there is no phonological difference; der, on the other hand, for masculine nominative can easily be distinguished from its morphological counterpart in the accusative, den. Researchers

like

Clahsen have argued that the emergence of accusative can only be observed when limited to den, the only case marking being visible. As for neuter and feminine, one cannot say for sure if the child uses nominative or accusative. 1.5. Stage V. 1.5.1. Embedded clauses. Up to now the child has only been producing utterances consisting of not more than a single clause. In stage V, researchers have noticed the usage of more than one clause within a single utterance. These clauses are connected by subordinate conjunctions (e.g. wenn, 'when', well 'because', daß 'that', ob 'whether'), relative pronouns, question words, or coordinate conjunctions (e.g. aber 'but'). As both types of conjunctions appear at about the same time, no generalization on the order of acquisition can be drawn. What can be said,

38

Two First Languages

however, is that the child expresses a fixed set of accessible notions. This set contains the following four types (cf. Bloom et al., 1980), each of them illustrated by the examples given below. (26)

(26)

a. additive und der mond is hier 'and the moon is here' b. adversative aber das fährt rückwärts 'but that go backwards' (=The train goes backwards.) c. causal weil ich ein stern machen muß 'because I a star make must' (=Because I must make a star.) d. temporal wenn die größer is 'when she bigger is' (By the time Julia is bigger she will attend kindergarten.)

J

D

M

M

Quite clearly, the child's developing semantic system imposes a tight restriction on the extent and manner of notions that can be expressed through complex clauses. This restriction will be lifted as soon as the child has the cognitive ability to produce other complex clauses (e.g. modal) - a field of research that has not been studied as yet. As soon as embedded clauses emerge, finite verbal elements, whether simple or discontinuous,

are placed correctly in sentence-final position. This observation is rather

astonishing. After acquiring verb-second placement in main clauses, one might predict an initial overgeneralization of verb-second placement in embedded clauses. Such an overgeneralization seems to be even more likely since the child also overgeneralizes in other areas of the acquisition of grammar, for instance, case morphology. But all of the investigations carried out on verb placement in embedded clauses agree that there are practically no mistakes. This finding holds for spontaneous data but equally for elicited data in experimental settings (cf. Park, 1976). The child is at approximately age 3;6 when he/she deals with embedded clauses for the first time. Note that subordinate clauses in particular occasionally lack their conjunctions. (27)

weiß nich der hingeflogen is 'know not it to-flown is' (=l do not know (where) it has flown to.)

M

1.5.2. Complements. At about the same time, the child starts producing utterances with two objects, hence meeting the requirement of those verbs which take more than one argument.

Callings: Acquisition of German

39

(28)

a. ich hol mir den schätzen fisch fetch me the black fish' (M. wants to catch the black fish.)

M

(28)

b. du sollst mich kluntjen runterholen 'you must me lumps of sugar downfetch' (D. wants a person to get him some lumps of sugar.)

D

1.5.3. Case morphology. (28a) and (28b) share a characteristic that is typical for stage V, too. Nominatives are no longer overgeneralized. Instead, a system of nominative for the subject of a sentence versus accusative for any other case not functioning as the subject, gets established, cf. (29a). This means that accusative forms such as the definite article den and the pronominal forms mich 'me', dich 'you', etc. not only occur in accusative contexts but may also be found in dative contexts. Later, but still in stage V, dative forms, e.g. mir 'me', dir 'you', emerge (29b). They are clearly distinguished from accusative forms in that they almost never show up in accusative contexts. (29)

The

a. ich kann mich knien can me kneel' (D. is able to kneel down.)

D

b. der hört mir 'that belongs me' (=That belongs to me.)

M

acquisition of the

full

genitive paradigm

is a subject beyond the scope of the

developmental scale presented here, but one will notice that the acquisition of German case morphology takes place very late. In comparison with this, Slobin (1982b) reports that Turkish children have already mastered the case system of their target language at the age of two. Clahsen (1988c) supposes that the reason why German causes more difficulty in this respect lies in the fact that standard German, having a system of plurifunctional synthetic case markers, lacks a clear-cut relationship between form and function, a relationship Turkish evidently has since it belongs to the group of agglutinative languages.

Furthermore, the standard German

morphological case paradigm displays a high degree of syncretism, i.e. a given form expresses a number of functions, e.g. der may correspond to both masculine singular nominative, feminine singular dative, feminine singular genitive and plural genitive. 1.5.4. Negation and interrogation. As for negation, no new developments take place. Since correct sentence negation can be interpreted as a side-effect of the acquisition of the verb movement rule, the child may handle equally well sentence negation in main and embedded clauses. As the finite verb does not move from sentence-final to sentence-second position in

40

Two First Languages

embedded clauses, the negation word can remain in a preverbal position, hence leading to correct word order (30). (30)

weil das nich gern mochte 'because it not gladly want' (=Because I do not want it very much.)

M

There are changes within the field of interrogation. Indirect questions, which are opened by ob 'whether' or by question words, can now also be generated, leading to indirect alternative questions (31 a) or to indirect questions for information (31 b). Conjunctions opening indirect alternative questions may sometimes be omitted. (31)

a. ich will mal sehen ob das schwarz ist want see whether that black is' (M. wants to look through the video camera.)

M

b. weiß nich wo das is 'know not where that is' (D. is looking for a lump of sugar which he cannot find.)

D

2. BEYOND THE PROFILE CHART.

The picture that has been emerging so far portrays main developments in the acquisition of German morphology and syntax. It is still very unclear and demands further research in all of the areas discussed above. In accordance with Mills (1985), I think that "a combination of data from both sources (i.e. spontaneous production and detailed experimentation, A.C.) is likely to give the most insight into the acquisition of a particular area" (246). This seems even more important when one is aware of the fact that the (available) data give rise to considerable debate on the underlying processes of language acquisition. Such debate concerns, for example, the influence universal grammar is assumed to wield, and the child's own role in acquiring its first language. Occasionally, the points at issue have been hinted at while summarizing major findings on the acquisition of German; e.g. the question if verb-second placement in questions, automatically appears after the verb flexive -st has been identified by the child, or if it is a separate syntactic rule that has to be learned.

Callings: Acquisition of German

41

2.1. Gender. Due to limited space, I shall deal with gender only as far as articles are concerned; needless to say that gender in German is assigned to many more word classes than just the article, e.g. adjectives, (relative) pronouns, etc. Gender assignment might be regarded as an area of extreme difficulty, given that there are no clear rules the child can follow. Instead, researchers have been baffled by the observation Mills summarizes like this: 'when the definite article is produced in its full form, it is most frequently correct in gender.1 (1985:174). Authors like Maratsos (1979) then, could be wrong in claiming that the classification is arbitrary* (232). It rather appears as if the child makes use of regularities yet to be discovered by linguists. Some of these regularities, however, have already been established. Kopeke & Zubin (1983) point out that the child pays attention primarily to formal markings on German nouns, in particular to a highly complex interplay between morphology and phonology in order to assign the correct gender. Such formal markings are not only available in German but also in other languages having a multidimensional gender system; evidence comes from cross-linguistic research on Russian (Popova, 1958), Hebrew (Berman, 1981), and French (Karmiloff-Smith, 1978). Authors like MacWhinney (1978) who adopt a functional approach, stress the effectiveness of two principles which are supposed to have a profound influence on correct and incorrect gender assignment. Few mistakes are found and concern

most of all an overgeneralizations of die

(definite feminine article) and eine (indefinite feminine article). In case mistakes like these appear, the principle of frequency is held responsible for the overgeneralization of die because die accounts for about 50% of the nominative and accusative case forms; overgeneralizations of eine are attributed to the principle of saliencv which predicts that the child will focus on those forms that are more salient than others, i.e. eine being polysyllabic is said to be more salient than ein (indefinite masculine/neuter article) which is monosyllabic. Explanations like these can be regarded as a first attempt in disentangling the complexity of •syntactic gender assignment'. 'Natural gender assignment' does not seem to be that complicated. Here, the child can often use semantic cues, e.g. the animacy of a noun to select the right gender. Mills (1986b) has undertaken the most extensive analysis in the acquisition of German gender so far. She scrutinizes both available data and data she personally collected in a longitudinal study. Her work could therefore serve best as a preliminary look at the acquisitional order. According to her, full (as opposed to 'fragmentary', see stage II) indefinite articles appear before full definite articles. When both article forms are used equally frequently, more errors can

42

Two First Languages

be found with the indefinite article. In most cases the indefinite feminine article, eine, is overgeneralized. According to Mills a couple of factors are at work to induce such errors, e.g. one, the high frequency of the ending -e in the adjective and article paradigm, two, an ambiguous input in that the indefinite article has the same form, ein, for neuter and masculine. Overgeneralization of the indefinite feminine article only holds for the earliest stages; children at age 3;0 are said to produce hardly any more erroneous forms. As stated above, definite articles are correct in gender in the majority of cases. Mills believes that children produce the definite article later than the indefinite article due to an avoidance strategy; as long as they are unsure of the correct form, they avoid it "when they become more confident of selecting the correct form, they produce it" (92). Mills, unfortunately, does not comment on how or why the children should become "more confident". She notes that children produce the definite article more often with feminine gender nouns but that they also use it faultily probably "due to an association with the plural article" (114). In showing that German plural morphology does not precede a knowledge of gender, she concludes that gender is not related to plural forms and is acquired independently by the child. In her opinion, a firm though not-yet-captured interaction between semantic and morphophonological rules triggers the acquisition of gender. Semantic rules, such as natural gender assignment, and formal rules, such as the phonological rule associating the noun ending -e with feminine gender, are exploited by the child in parallel. Still, erroneous gender assignment can be found up to age 10;0. Mills thinks that up to this age, there are a few rules left to be acquired, presumably depending on the expansion of the child's lexicon. 2.2. Number. First language acquisition research on the German plural system lacks both a greater number of comprehensive longitudinal studies and cross-sectional investigations based on spontaneous production.

The available data are mostly unsystematic and have been elicited mainly in

experimental settings. In the earliest stages of language acquisition (stage I, II), the child predominantly uses nouns in the unmarked singular. Plurals are rarely found and if present are correct. They do not seem to be the result of any productive rule at work, rather they are examples of rote learning. Later, not only plural forms but also mistaken plural forms become more common. In accordance with Ramge (1975), Mugdan (1977) reports depending on the child's age,

on different overgeneralizations

starting with -te)n. then -se (no such allomorph exists in

German; both -s and -e, however, are plural allomorphs), and eventually (after the acquisition of the umlaut allomorph) umlaut + -e. Such strategies have all been observed to hold between age two and three. From four years onwards, Mills notes that children most often overgeneralize

Callings: Acquisition of German

43

the most applicable allomorph -(ein. Without giving reference to the source of data she is referring to, Mills also claims that at this stage, 'nouns which take the zero plural allomorph are often marked for plural, indicating a tendency to mark all forms clearly" (157). Mills concludes that the German plural system appears late due to "the complexity of the system and the lack of regularity1 (226). Park (1978) who is one of the very few researchers observing (two) German children over a longer period of time, draws a similar conclusion. He rejects any proposal regarding the German plural system as being rule—governed. Instead, he emphasizes that all plural forms have to be learned by rote 'conditioned by morphological complexity which cannot be subsumed under any general rule" (237). There are mainly two findings he puts forward in support of his claim. On the one hand, plurals occur not only in plural contexts but also often in singular contexts "partly because of as yet unestablished verb conjugation rules" (237). On the other hand, the two children sometimes deviate from the German plural morphology in that they attach an additional plural allomorph to an already correctly marked plural. Both findings should be treated with caution. The first finding seems to speak to a functional un(der)differentiation of the plural in relationship to the singular. Park's proposal, however, does not seem to fit because there has been neither theoretical nor empirical evidence so far as to why the acquisition of the German plural system should be linked to the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in any way. But even under the assumption that such a correlation exists, there would be a contradiction between Park's first claim that the child does not know that plurality is expressed in using plurals in singular contexts, and his second claim that the child does know about it "in producing formally correct plural utterances in inappropriate singular contexts" (245). That is, Park proposes that the child applies a correct noun plural form to a verb having the flexive -n, thus marking plural in a context demanding singular marking, both on noun and verb. This viewpoint is in opposition to the findings presented in the first section (see stage IV); as mentioned above, the verb flexive -n does not seem to express grammatical properties of the subject as long as it is used inadequately. The second finding also appears peculiar if taken in support of rote learning. In case each plural form were to be learned by rote, it would be improbable that the child attaches additional plural morphemes, especially since there is in all cases only one, the allomorph -{gin. Such a finding could well be interpreted as a hint at the child's ability to distinguish between regularly and irregularly assigned plural allomorphs at the very earliest stages of acquisition. Evidently, many more comparable studies are needed to solve the question if it is rote learning only, or initially, which the child uses in order to acquire the German system of number. During the past ten years it has been discovered (Mugdan, 1977) that the German plural system has regularities any speaker can make use of when forced to assign plural allomorphs to words s/he has never heard before. These regularities depend on the gender of a noun and its

44

Two First Languages

specific morphophonological properties, and to a lesser extent, on its semantic properties, such as animacy. Hence, as has already been shown for the assignment of gender, one can imagine that the child uses such cues to build up the German plural system. Given the complexity of the system, it becomes probable that the child makes mistakes as long as s/he cannot fully benefit from the linguistic properties inherent in a noun. Mills' conclusion, thus, can be agreed to in particular when she calls the system "complex". Look, for example, at the fact that the plural allomorph -er (see 32a) cannot be easily identified because -er can also serve as a derivational suffix (see 32b) in German (Durell, 1977). (32)

a. Kinder 'children'

Männer 'men'

b. Mörder 'murderer'

Fahrer 'driver'

Nothing has been said about the elicited data in this area. Many times (cf. Park, 1978; Gibitz, 1970; Mugdan, 1977) the child, when asked to name the plural form of a nonce or a real word uses the singular form or zero allomorph. Note that the status of this response remains ambiguous since the zero allomorph is one of the possible allomorphs in the German plural system. There has not been a convincing explanation for this behavior. Mugdan states that responding in the observed way can be regarded as taking an escape route which will be used unless the child has a different solution that seems to be adequate (see p. 173). This sounds too much like an ad hoc answer to the problem, even more so when one considers that the youngest children tested were 4;4 years old, and the oldest were 9;2 years of age. It would clearly speak against the competence hypothesis if native speakers were not capable of assigning plural allomorphs to either loan or nonce words. Mills, as well, seems to be dissatisfied with this explanation and asks for more data from spontaneous utterances in order to decide

"whether zero marking is an artifact of the

experimental situation' (226). Attention should also be directed to the fact that plural forms elicited in tests do not necessarily correspond to plural forms found in spontaneous production. This difference cannot yet be properly accounted for either. Some authors consider data from experimental designs as reflections of an acquisitional stage the child has already mastered. Others, like Mugdan, think spontaneously formed plurals are pure lexical entries while elicited plural forms are built on the basis of certain rules. I shall not go into further detail here. All the areas mentioned must be further investigated. The developmental scale presented in the first part is claimed to be a great help in evaluating a

Callings: Acquisition of German

45

child's progress towards standard German and could consequently also be applicable to defective language acquisition (Clahsen 1986a, 1988a). Linguistic phenomena like gender or number cannot be integrated into the developmental chart yet. There is no doubt that such an integration is desirable; first steps towards this goal have presently been taken but need further elaboration4.

3. FOOTNOTES. 1. Such research contains both the early investigations carried out by Stern & Stern (1907), and more recent works (e.g., Anders, 1980; Grimm, 1973). Clahsen scrutinized all of these studies and compared them with the data he himself collected (cf. Clahsen, 1982a), in order to establish the •profile analysis'. Unfortunately, most of the available research is based upon longitudinal investigations which rarely deal with more than one child each. A representative cross-sectional study would therefore be of vital importance in order to prove whether the developmental scale is both reliable and valid. 2. Apart from example (24), all the other examples have been taken from Clahsen (1982a); "D" being 'Daniel', 'M1 being 'Mathias', and "J' being 'Julia'. (24) has been taken from Scupin & Scupin (1907,1910), as quoted in Mills (1985:178). 3. In accordance with Clahsen and other researchers, I assume that the underlying sentence pattern of German is subject-object-verb. Many structures suggest this hypothesis: subordinate and infinitive clauses, clauses with a modal or an auxiliary all have the verb in clause-final position. Sentence-second position, however, is restricted to finite verbs in main clauses. Certain grammatical analyses (e.g., Kratzer, 1984), which cannot be elaborated on here, derive verb-second placement via a verb movement rule. As for child language, the finite verb in main clauses will not appear in the right position unless the verb movement rule has been acquired. Note that the verb movement rule must also be employed in utterances like (11) where the verb is intransitive, and a complement appears in the first position of the sentence. 4. A research group dealing with 'language acquisition and developmental dysphasia" is currently working at the Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft of the University of Düsseldorf. At present the group has six researchers: Harald Clahsen, Birgit Puschmann, Monika Rothweiler, Beate Uzarewicz, Andreas Woest, and myself.

CHAPTER 3

THE ACQUSITION OF FRENCH BY MONOLINGUAL CHILDREN A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Kerstin Sabine Keinen & Helga Kadow

48

Two First Languages

0. INTRODUCTION.

Cognitive development in general and linguistic development in particular proceed through ordered phases. This is one of the most important insights of developmental psychology since Plaget which has been confirmed many times by language acquisition studies, for first as well as for second language acquisition. Numerous empirical studies have shown that an invariable developmental sequence exists which can be defined in terms of linguistic structures emerging in children's language use. Surprisingly little, however, is known about the developmental phases which characterize the acquisition of French as a first language. This is even more astonishing in view of the fact that an impressive amount of studies exist analyzing the language of monolingual French children; see the comprehensive bibliography compiled by Lightbown (1983). We would like to refer to E. Clark (1985) for an interesting state-of-the-art description of the available results on this topic . In spite of these efforts, we only possess rather fragmentary information concerning the question of the chronological order in which grammatical features of French emerge. Even less is known about what may be considered to be invariable developmental patterns, as opposed to individual or group-specific variation. And it remains largely mysterious at what point of development approximately (in terms of age or of MLU = Mean Length of Utterance) specific structures begin to be used. In this chapter, we will try to remedy some of these short-comings. In order to do so, we will summarize and elaborate on the results of Kadow (1987) and of Meinen (1988). These two studies present a critical review and an evaluation of the findings of a number of works published over an extended period of time, i.e. from 1891 up to 1985. Since our aim is to establish a developmental sequence, we will rely primarily on longitudinal studies, focusing on those pieces of research which present a substantial body of data of spontaneous child utterances. Altogether 15 studies of 18 children in all have been analyzed in detail. Most of these are based on language diaries kept by researchers observing their own children. In 1.2. below, we will explain our choice of these studies in more detail, the nature of the data offered there, as well as the theoretical framework used by the various resarchers in interpreting the data. 1. DEFINITIONS AND LINGUISTIC DATA. 1.1. Definitions of 'developmental sequence'. To begin with, it should be pointed out that the way we understand the term "developmental sequence' differs markedly from how it is understood by the so-called 'morpheme order studies', following Brown (1973). We follow, instead, the definition suggested by Wode (1981), Felix (1982), and others. This is to say that a sequence is defined in terms of grammatical

Meinen & Kadow: Acquisition of French

49

structures emerging in a fixed order in the speech of all children. These structures, however, can be bundled into stages. The order of these stages within this sequence is not reversible, i.e. a child cannot go through stage X+i first, and then enter stage X. This does not necessarily exclude the possibility, however, that a stage may be kipped altogether. Also, nothing is said about the duration of phases for individuals or for groups. Each stage is characterized by a set of grammatical features whose order of appearance, in opposition to the stage, is not fixed, i.e. children may differ with respect to the order of acquisition of various structural properties within a given phase. The concept of a developmental sequence predicts, however, that no structure belonging to stage X will make its first appearance at stage X-i or at X+i. One may thus say that the developmental sequence reflects the invariant parts of the language acquisition process without excluding the possibility of individual or group variation. It is evident that this kind of knowledge not only offers important insights into the underlying mechanisms determining language acquisition processes, it is also crucial for all kinds of evaluations of other types of language developments, e.g. second language learning, pathological development etc. In order to be able to assess degree of deviance or of difference, as opposed to non-pathological first language development, some kind of means of evaluation is needed. The developmental sequence can be the basis for such a measure; see, for example, the profile analysis suggested by Crystal et al. (1984) for English or by Clahsen (1986a) for German. Similarly, if we want to ascertain whether bilingual first language acquisition is substantially identical to monolingual acquisition, we need to be able to refer to invariant developmental patterns. 1.2. Proceeding to work out phases. To begin with, we follow Clahsen's (1986a) and Brown's (1973) division of language acquisition into five phases. The early phases I and II are mainly defined quantitatively (one-word-stage and two-word-stage) whereas the following phases (III - V ) are characterized qualitatively. We therefore attempt to discern clusters of grammatical features characterizing specific phases. In another step, we will reinterpret the data trying to find a possible underlying logic of development, i.e. a reason for simultaneous 01 successive acquisition of certain grammatical elements. On the basis of the newly defined criteria we will suggest slightly different developmental stages.

50

Two First Languages

1.3. The data base. Our investigations are based on studies carried out by the following authors: AUTHOR

CHILD

AGE

UTTERANCES

G. Deville

(1891)

Suzanne (Suz)

1;Q- 2;0

235

Decroly & Degand

(1913)

S. (S)

2;0- 5;6

162

J. Vinson

(1915/16)

Paul (P)

1;0- 3;0

250

O. Bloch

(1921) (1923) (1924)

Jacqueline (JB) Frangoise (FB) Raymond (RB)

1;10-3;8 1;10-3;6 1;5-3;7

140 60 82

Cohen

(1925) (1952)

Francis (FC) Laurence (LC) Christiane (CC) Jerome (JC) Jean-Louis (JLC)

0;9- 3;5 0;8- 3;9 2;3 2;2

170 135 120 80 80

P. Guillaume

(1927a) (1927b)

P. (PG) L. (LG)

]:°I 2;0

250 36

O. Decroly

(1934)

E. (E)

H4- 3;7

130

A. Gregoire

(1937) (1947)

Charles (Ch) Edmond (Edm)

0;0- 3;3 0;0- 3;2

500 350

D. Frangois

(1977)

Eva (Eva)

0;0- 3;6

100

C. Fondet

(1979)

Gabriel (G)

0;0- 6;0

1100

These longitudinal studies were chosen because they contain a certain number of spontaneous data and cover a period of at least one year. Basing our decision on the above mentioned criteria, we find that the most useful studies are the ones by A. Gregoire (1937,1947) and C. Fondet (1979). But in order to give the reader an idea of the different kinds of studies and their degree of reliability, we will briefly introduce the material used for our investigations. Gregoire studied the acquisition of French by his two sons Ch(arles) and Edm(ond). His study is not only useful because of the numerous examples given of his sons' utterances (500 and 350 resp.) but also because of his investigation focusing on the acquisition of grammatical phenomena, such as article, personal pronoun, negation etc. C. Fondet's study (1979) is one of the most interesting ones with respect to linguistic data. Although she is interested primarily in the psychological development of children, the

Meinen & Kadow: Acquisition of French

51

chronological list of approximately 1100 utterances by her son Gabriel (0;0 - 6;0) on 150 pages offers useful material for our purpose, i.e. finding developmental sequences for the acquisition of French grammar. More than 60 years ago, P. Guillaume (1925, 1927a,b) was already interested in the development of grammar, and he gave many examples (250) about his son's language development PG (P. Guillaume), but unfortunately only very few (36) about that of his daughter LG (L. Guillaume). Two other researchers, G. Deville (1891) and J. Vinson (1915-16) in their rather detailed diaries of their children's, Suz and P's, language acquisition, focused their attention mainly on newly acquired words. Fortunately they also stated groups of words, thus revealing insights into grammatical acquisition as well. The most reliable data stem from the children of the above mentioned studies (with the exception of LG). M. Cohen's findings (1925, 1952) on the language acquisition process of young children also proved to be useful, although the corpora of his 3 children, FC, LC and CC and of his grand children JL and JLC are rather small and those of FC, JL and JLC show rather large gaps. (FC = 170, LC = 135, CC = 120, JL = 80, JLC = 80 utterances). C. Bloch in his publications (1921, 1923, 1924) summarizes the results of the longitudinal studies about his 3 children JB, RB and FB (140, 82, 60 utterances resp.) and cites examples especially to sustain his opinion that in his third year, the child is strained broadening his vocabulary and learning grammar at the same time. It is therefore likely that Bloch's examples do not represent the children's progress correctly, since some of them are in a way 'negative' examples. O. Decroly summarizes in his book (1934) results of research work on language acquisition in different languages and only adds examples of utterances by a girl E (130 utterances) observed by him.

Decroly & Degand (1913) were interested in the development of the notion of time and therefore only give examples relating to this problem. In the article by D. Frangois (1977), we find approximately 100 utterances by one girl (Eva). These utterances represent a small selection of a corpus of a study by Sabeau-Jouannet. Unfortunately, the information on the age at which an utterance was made is sometimes rather vague, e.g. 'utterances produced in the range of 20 to 22 months", without giving a chronological order. 1.4. What is-acquired·? A crucial point which has to be discussed before talking about acquisition stages is the question of when one may speak of a grammatical element being acquired. Wode's (1981) suggestion that around 90% target-like usage should be considered to be the critical point of acquisition,

52

Two First Languages

could not be adopted in this study, since the corpora are not big enough and not complete, and we have to rely on the information provided in the published sources. Also, it becomes evident from our corpora that the child acquires small parts of different grammatical subcategories simultaneously, uses these for some time, and then slowly enlarges them by adding further items, thus adopting a cyclic procedure. He so to speak first learns the principle of some grammatical subsystem. But even after having grasped the principle of a given subsystem, he may still fail to use it correctly in all instances. It can generally be observed, for example, that articles, shortly after they have appeared for the first time, are omitted again, or that an auxiliary verb used in one part of an utterance is missing in another part. The frequency of omissions nevertheless decreases. In our own studies, Kadow (1987) and Meinen (1988), we therefore based the proposed developmental sequence of certain grammatical elements on the beginning of their use. We did not take very early sporadic examples into consideration, though, as the probability of their being unanalyzed imitated utterances (rote learning) was too great. Nevertheless, in cases where we only possess small samples of data from one child, it often proved difficult to decide whether one isolated example simply reflected the limited amount of data available and could therefore be used as an indication of acquisition, or whether it was an unanalyzed forerunner of an acquired element. Moreover, the data samples we had at our disposal already represent a choice the authors of the studies had made, and most of them were not interested in grammatical development. Bloch, for example, might only have picked out utterances where grammatical words such as prepositions, articles, conjunctions etc. were missing, since children, as already mentioned, even if they know how to use prepositions etc., frequently omit them later on. Furthermore, one has to differentiate between form and function. It is not always possible to decide whether the authors themselves considered the appearance (form) of a grammatical feature as the more important criterion of acquisition or its correct use (function). When the child starts to acquire a grammatical feature (s)/he begins to produce the form of this feature. The functions are acquired step by step. This means that there might be considerable differences with respect to the point of acquisition depending on whether one considers the form or the function as a criterion. An interesting example to underline this hypothesis are the past participle forms (see 3.4.) which are already produced during phase I and II, but whose function to express the past in connection with auxiliaries (passe compose) is acquired at the end of phase III. All this was borne in mind while we tried to decide on whether a feature was acquired or not. When we talk in what follows of a feature being acquired, we mean it is used productively.

Meinen & Kadow: Acquisition of French

53

2. IN SEARCH OF A DEVELOPMENTAL SEQUENCE.

Bearing in mind Brown's (1973) and Clahsen's (1986a) division of a developmental sequence into five stages for English and German respectively, we tried, in a first attempt, to structure our empirical findings according to five possible stages for French, too. As a first step we determined the moment of acquisition for each grammatical feature according to the above-mentioned criteria (see Table I) and then established a chronological order for each child. Table I shows the age at which the different grammatical elements of phases III to V were acquired by each child (point of acquisition according to the criteria explained in 1.4.). The age is noted in brackets when it was difficult to decide whether the child had really acquired the particular grammatical feature in question then. In our attempt to bundle these features, each of us adopted a different procedure. Meinen (1988) adhered strictly to Felix' definition, i.e. she accepted as defining criteria for a stage only those elements that were identical for all children, leaving out all other grammatical elements, e.g. the grammatical elements defining phase III were thus "articles', "prepositions" and "indicative present". Kadow (1987) clustered grammatical features, trying to assign them to phases III, IV and V, relying on Clahsen's (1986a) findings that the grammatical acquisition of young children shows some discontinuity, i.e. that it is characterized by periods in which various grammatical phenomena are acquired during a relatively short period of time, alternating with periods during which no significant progress is made. Kadow (1987) therefore examined the data for discontinuity of this kind, beginning with the most extensive and most reliable corpus (Ch) where in fact ruptures in the language acquisition process were perceivable, suggesting the beginning of a new phase. She compared the three major clusters obtained in this way with the data of the other children to find out whether similar successive clusters of grammatical elements characterizing phases III to V could be found there, too. She then defined the phases in accordance with the clusters found in the data of the majority of the children and especially of those with the most reliable data, while, however, bearing the deviations in mind. 2.1. Developmental stages. Although we started out from Brown's (1973) and Clahsen's (1986a) division into five stages, it proved problematic to adopt the definition of their phases for the French language as the features characterizing phases in English and in German are not necessarily the same for French. Different properties of the grammatical system are expected to be crucial for the order of acquisition. This, however, does not necessarily apply to the first two phases.

54

Two First Languages

O

4 u>

° r-l

3

σι

c» W

IN (N

P

ω

r-

MIN

IN

w

(N

-

o rw

IN

'

?.?.

?.

Wl

U>

Z-

iH

S rf

O

~

£

0

0

0

rj

-

~

,

,

,

,

T.

•

•

3

1

ve

O

•

J 1

-

\D

r»

i- a

•-3

IN

M

3 r>

«

M

AT

0

o

2^

"l-(

?1

co

~

S Ξ«, \e rJd ^

-

r. r*

'

W

0

N °

-H

->

audessous(de)'under' derriere 'behind' la-dessus Over' sous 'under' derriere sous sur On'

130

Two First Languages

Either only the first and some of the following prepositions or all occurrences of the specific type are given (cf. Appendix, Table 1-3). German

Subject Caroline

Topological 2,2 ->

Christophe

2;3

Ivar

2;2

Euclidian auf On' zu 'to' in'in' etc.

3;4

->

unter'under' neben 'at the side of hinter 'behind' etc.

->

in auf etc.

3;3

->

unter durch 'through' vor 'in front of

->

in auf zu

2;10

->

über Over' unter

etc. Either only the first and some of the following prepositions or all occurrences of the particular type are given (cf. Appendix, Table 1-3). 3.3. Omissions and misuses. Research on child language generally agrees on the fact that it takes the child a certain time to encode semantic structures properly on the formal linguistic level. Thus, another way of extracting information from the relationship between words and conceptual development is to analyze the omissions and misuses, e.g. substitutions or overextensions, which seem to be very common among first language learners during the early stages of acquisition. In the view of language acquisition patterns in other fields it seems reasonable to assume that the use of prepositions should be preceded by a period characterized by existing prepositional contexts in which the functional word is missing. Subsequently, young children may simply omit certain prepositions expressing (locative) relations too complex for their respective developmental stage, i.e., the children lack different constituents for different reasons, until their language generally conforms to the regularities of the target system. 3.3.1 Omissions. One can observe more omissions in the speech of children under the age of three than in later stages of linguistic development, when they tend rather to use a known preposition for one not yet known. The omissions, which are not numerous in the analyzed data as a whole (cf. Valian, 1986), and are documented far more often in German than in French, mostly refer to (locative) prepositions which will appear shortly afterwards in the utterances or are already part of the repertoire. Interestingly enough, this does not seem to apply in exactly the

Klinge: Prepositions

131

same way to prepositions expressing euclidian spatial relations, which seem to represent a major acquisitional problem.10 Thus, the children tend to use such words only in later stages and no omissions are documented in the analyzed data. However, it may be somewhat premature to conclude a qualitatively distinct acquisitional pattern from their rare occurrences. French Caroline's data reveal omissions between the age of 2; 1,26 and 3; 10,21, though, on the whole, most of them are found before the age of three. In French, there are fewer utterances of this type than there are in German. The child omits ä 'in/at', dans 'in', avec 'mit', sur On' and de Of/from', i.e., prepositions that are already part of her linguistic repertoire. The same applies to Christophe except that his omissions cover the whole period under investigation (starting at about the age of 2;2,29), as he never obtains a sufficient competence in French. As regards Ivar, his data reveal the highest number of missing prepositions between the age of 2;0,2 and 2;5,7. During this period he utters only few prepositions in both languages, whereas after the age of 2;6,6, when he has definitely reached the three-word-stage, there is a remarkable increase in PP. Another increase of this kind occurs at MLU > 5, i.e. in French at the age of 3;1,3, correspondingly in German at about the age of 3;4,23. German The German data reveal approximately the same pattern. The children omit those prepositions which were the first to be acquired and are used frequently, as regards Caroline in 'in', auf On', mit 'with' and für 'for', and Christophe in 'in', zu 'to' and auf On', and, correspondingly, Ivar in 'in', auf On', mit 'with' and für 'for'. By and by, the children tend to use other prepositions in this context. This, however, starts at different points of their linguistic development. Caroline's utterances show hardly any omissions after the age of 2;7,20 (MLU 3,08), whereas they are documented in Christophe's data until the age of 3;6,18 (MLU > 5), though most of them occur before the age of 3;6. In the recordings of Ivar, there are only few prepositions missing after the ageof2;9,18(MLU3,82). 3.3.2 Substitutions. Like the omissions, the substitutions were mainly documented during early periods of language acquisition. It is worth noting that, apart from a few exceptions in which the German preposition für 'for' is used instead of the German pronominal adverb damit 'with that/so that/thereby', or in 'in' + da 'there' instead of the locative adverb darein 'into that/into it', respectively French Ja 'there' + dans 'in' instead of

-dedans 'into that/into it', all

substitutions come from the same functional category and operate within certain semantic restrictions, i.e. locative prepositions replace locative ones, though the internal semantic

132

Two First Languages

organization of this functor class seems to be partly incomplete. As all of the substitutions remain in the functor class of prepositions, one may conclude that the children seem to have already learned to differentiate between the distinct word classes. On the whole, substitutions occur far more often in the German than in the French data. In some cases there seem to be language specific reasons for the distinct acquisitional pattern. A differentiation that is made within the German system of locative prepositions, zu 'to' versus nach 'to', for encoding distinct local and directional spatial relations with regard to persons and places involved11, does not exist in French, where these relations are simply expressed by a 'to'. They should not cause acquisitional difficulties. However, if one compares this acquisitional problem to some other recorded substitutions, there seems to exist as well a variation according to the learner's stage of cognitive development. In spite of the restricted data, one may therefore state that younger children obviously have not yet learned to differentiate reliably between the notions local and directional (cf. Lyons 1977; Miller & Johnson-Laird 1976). Only by the age of about 3;7-4;0 does the individual child seem to master sufficiently this primary distinction. This may serve as a plausible explanation for at least some of the variation observed with the field of prepositional substitutions. French For the French data no substitution tables are given, as the children's utterances reveal only three or four substituted prepositions for each of the three subjects during the period under investigation. These are locative prepositions that are incorrectly combined with adverbs or replaced by other locative ones, i.e., the overextensions operate within assumed semantic and formal restrictions. Caroline (1) il etait la dedans (=il etait lä/il etait dedans/il etait la-dedans) 'he was there in'

4;6,27

German Caroline's substitutions occur mostly within the period between the age of 2;6,8 and 3;3,17 but last until the age of 4;3,2. (2)

sollen raus in da (=sollen raus, darein) 'take (them) out, (put them) in there'

2;6,8

(3)

ab in die pferd (=auf das Pferd) 'in the horse'

2;6,8

Klinge: Prepositions

133

(4)

war auf mein fenster (=das war vor meinem Fenster) 'was on my window'

3;1,28

(5)

kommt hier denn bei uns (=er kommt hier denn zu uns) 'comes here then at/with us)

3;8,25

(6)

hier bin nach haus (=hier bin ich zu Haus) 'here I am to home'

3;3,17

(7)

dann geh' ich zu haus (=dann gehe ich nach Haus) 'then I walk at home'

3;9,22

(8)

jetzt kommt zu haus (=jetzt kommt er nach Haus) 'now comes at home'

4;3,2

Table 4: Substitutions of German Prepositions (Caroline) Preposition

replaced by in auf

in auf zu nach

an von vor aus

2

zu 1

nach

von

vor

bei

1 1

mit 1

2 2

1 1

In the table above the type/token relation is given. As the period under investigation stops at the age of 3;5,28 for Ivar, prepositional substitutions are documented until the last recording, though they become less frequent towards the end, and may often be due to incorrect German articles, e.g., in/im, i.e. case marking. (9)

für nich der [nöwe] beißt (=damit der Löwe nicht beißt) 'so that the lion does not bite'

2; 11,21

(10)

ja dann geh'ich im zirkus (=ja dann gehe ich in den Zirkus) 'well then I go in circus'

3;3,12

(11)

jetzt muß der im krankenwagen (=jetzt muß der in den Krankenwagen) 'now he must (go) in the ambulance'

3;3,12

134

Two First Languages Table 5: Substitutions of German Prepositions (Ivari

Preposition

replaced by im in 11 2 2 1

in im auf zu an am von aus mit

zu

an

bei

vom

1 1 1

1 1

1

1

1 1

In the table above the type/token relation is given. Christophers substitutions mainly take place between the age of 2;9,29 and 3;7,28 but do not completely disappear until the end of the analyzed period.

(12)

da in da (=darein) 'there in there'

(13)

ich fahr' in T. (=ich fahre nach T.) drive in T./village near Hamburg)'

(14)

hieran Jean-Pierre (=hier zu Jean-Pierre) 'here at Jean-Pierre'

(15)

wir waren zu friseur (=wir waren beim Friseur) 'we were to hairdresser's'

3;2,22

(16)

zu Afrika (=nach Afrika) 'at Africa'

3;7,49

2;6,7

2;9,29

2; 11,16

Table 6: Substitutions of German Prepositions (Christophe) Preposition i n auf zu nach von bei

replaced by in im 1 2 1

an 1

zu 1 2 5 1 3

In the table above the type/token relation is given.

nach

bei

1

1

über

1

Klinge: Prepositions

135

3.3.2.1 Substitutions. That still leaves another kind of substitution, which is documented in our German data three times for Christophe, and once for Caroline and Ivar. In this particular case a PP, qualitativly different from the above mentioned, is uttered instead of a German infinitive construction. This specific type of syntactic structure has also been found in research on natural second language acquisition, but as there are only five occurrences between the three subjects during the period analyzed, this cannot serve as proof of an acquisitional pattern. German

Caroline (17)

zum das band zu reinmachen (=um das Band reinzumachen) 'to put the string into'12

4;3,2

[fo de] [fo de] reiten komm du (=für das Reiten/um zu reiten, komm du) 'for ride come you'

2;9,18

Ivar (18)

Christophe (19)

zu beule (=das Auto soll einen Unfall haben, um eine Beule zu bekommen) 'to (get a) bump'

3;7,14

(20)

für nach oben kommen (=um nach oben zu kommen) 'to get on top'

3; 10,3

(21)

ist zum zu den auto heben (=um das Auto zu heben) 'is to lift the car'

4;0,2

Only for Ivar do the data show as well correct infinitive constructions in both of the languages in question. In French he starts using them fairly regularly by the age of 3;2,14, whereas the German corpus reveals only one utterance of this type at the very end of the analyzed period. French (22) (pour) se baigner y'a des [flottes] (=de la flotte) 'there is water to swim in'

3;2,14

(23)

pour c'est pour manger (=c'est pour manger) 'that is meant to eat'

3;2,28

(24)

ou c' est les appareils pour regarder (=ou sont...) 'where is the instruments to look with'

3;4,23

136

Two First Languages

(25)

ga c'est pour courir

3;4,23

'that is meant for running' German (26) ich hat»' vergessen zu ihn fragen (=ich habe vergessen, ihn zu fragen) Ί forgot to ask him'

3;5,8

3.4 Temporal relations. Let us now turn to the development of temporal prepositions, using data obtained from Caroline and Ivar, though the letter's recordings reveal only few temporal occurrences due to his early acquisitional stage. The data of the third child, Christophe, include only one example which could be interpretated in a temporal sense. With regard to cognitive development, the genesis of the temporal concept is closely related to the pre-existing spatial one (cf. Piaget & Inhelder, 1975). That is, prepositions expressing temporal relations emerge only towards the end of the period under investigation and are markedly less variable than the locative terms. The data, however, do reveal various temporal adverbs. Interestingly enough the predominant pattern is in fact characterized by temporal prepositions which have already been used in a locative sense (cf. Appendix, Table 1-3). Thus, the available data suggests that the analyzed children do not acquire temporal prepositions (at least the documented ones) as separate notions, but that the existing locative system is partly transferred to the newly-formed temporal one. Old forms expressing new functions in this way (cf. Slobin, 1973) are clearly documented in the corpus. This developmental sequence becomes clearer in the German data than in the French. I, however, cannot detect any substitutions or interferences between the locative and the temporal field of the kind Grimm (1975) reported for her German preschoolers13, a fact which may be due to the restricted database of the present study. French Although Caroline starts to use temporal prepositions far earlier in French than in the German data, there are only rare occurrences which are limited to a single preposition pour 'for'. (27)

c'est pour demain 'this is for tomorrow'

3;5,8

In the French data, the temporal use of prepositions is documented neither for Christophe nor for Ivar, which, again, may be caused by Ivar's lower level of linguistic development due to his age.

Klinge: Prepositions

137

German Caroline's use of temporal prepositions starts at the age of 3;10,20. Subsequently these occurrences are documented regularly and with different prepositions. (28)

das ist für morgen 'this is for tomorrow'

3; 10,22

(29)

zumgeburtstag 14 'for (my) birthday'

4;1,5

(30)

in der nacht 'in/during the night'

4;6,0

(31)

den hab' ich auf einem fest gekriegt got this one at a party'

4;6,27

Ivar begins to use the preposition in 'in' in a temporal sense even earlier, at the age of 3;4,23. Thus, one can expect him to reveal approximately the same acquisitional pattern as Caroline during the recordings that follow the investigated period. (32)

aber (im im) drei wochen (=aber in drei Wochen) 'but in three weeks'

3;4,23

(33)

jetzt in drei wochen arbeite ich 'now in three weeks I (shall) work'

3;4,23

(34)

im abend auf die Alster (=am Abend an die Alster) 'in the evening on the Alster'

3;5,28

As the context is unclear as to the intended meaning, there may be a temporal intention in only one utterance of Christophe, supposing he replaced the "correct" preposition bis 'until' with auf On/for'. However, I suspect an error of syntactic subcategorization, presupposing the lexical entry warten auf 'waiting for'. (35)

muß warten auf der boot kommt (=... bis das das Boot kommt) '(I) must wait for the boat arrives'

3;7,14

3.5 Other prepositions. Though they are the same for both languages, the other prepositions the children use do not form as neat a group as the spatial ones. The remaining words are in French pour 'for' and avec 'with' and in German für 'for' and mit 'with'. These prepositions are learned for the most part after the first spatial terms have already been acquired. Although all of them were recorded between the ages of 2;0 and 3;4, no general acquisitional pattern can be deduced. The

138

Two First Languages

prepositions occur for the first time in the transitional period between the two and three-word stage (MLU 2,6 - 3,4), except the comitative use of mit or avec, which is normally documented at about MLU > 4. 3.5.1 Comitative and instrumental use of prepositions. The preposition mit 'with', or avec 'with', can be used in two distinct senses, either comitatively or instrumentally. The linguistic data of our subjects reveal a preference in time of acquisition and, at the beginning, in frequency of use, for the instrumental. Later on the data is about equally divided between the instrumental and the comitative use. In the period under investigation, there are also occurrences of the German •negative" preposition ohne 'without', but not of the French sans 'without'. No combinations of the intermediate type mit ohne 'with without', which are often discussed in the literature on German child language acquisition, are recorded. This, however, can be due to the fact that the subjects of the present study were only taped every two weeks, so we may have missed some prepositional uses. French Caroline (36) avec les legos 'with the legos'

3;4,7

(37)

II saute avec une corde 'he skips with a rope'

3;8,11

(38)

il joue avec une corde 'he plays with a rope'

3;9,22

(39)

avec maman et papa 'with mom and dad'

3;9,22

(40)

avec des feuilles 'with leaves (on it)'

4; 1,26

(41)

avec le marteau 'with the hammer'

2;5,7

(42)

avec le nounours 'with the teddy bear'

2;8,15

(43)

bon maintenant je va avec lui se battre (=bon maintenant je vais me battre avec lui) 'well, now I am going to fight him'

3;4,23

Ivar

Christophe (44) avec mon voiture (=avecmavoiture) 'with my car'

3;7,28

Klinge: Prepositions (45)

avec les petits 'with the little ones'

German Caroline (46) mit die ecken (=mit Ecken) 'with edges'

139 3;8,26

3;3,10

Ivar (47)

tor mit lego (=ein Tor mit Legosteinen bauen) ' (to construct) a gate with legos'

(48)

mit mama 'with mom'

2;9,18

(49)

Björn hat mit seine hand abgerißt (=Björn hat es mit seiner Hand abgerissen) 'Björn tore down with his hand'

3;4,23

Christophe (50) mit der auto (=mit dem auto) 'with the car'

2;4,9

2;7,30

(51)

mit dem finger 'with the finger'

2;10,16

(52)

mit licht 'with light'

3;0,4

(53)

mit papa 'with dad'

3;3,4

(54)

nur mit mein motorrad gespielt (=nur mit meinem Motorrad gespielt) Only played with my motorbike'

3;6,18

3.5.2 Benefactive use of prepositions. The German preposition für 'for', corresponding to the French pour 'for', can be used for encoding a benefactive relation. The child's communicative situations are very much oriented towards the acquisition of such a notion, which, as a result, appears quite early in the utterances, i.e., as one of the first prepositional terms expressed by the child. The recordings document a large number of contexts with the adult or the child handing over or receiving an object, and commenting on the activity with utterances containing these prepositions, e.g., Est-ce gue c'est pour le nounours? 'Is that for the teddy bear?', C'est pour Ivar ca. 'That is for Ivar.', Ist für der Mann da. 'Is for the man there.' Only in later stages of language acquisition this preposition is also used temporally (cf. the preceding paragraph).

140

Two First Languages

French

Caroline (55)

pourmaman 'for mom'

2; 1,13

(56)

pour mouton (=pourlemouton) 'for sheep'

2;2,9

(57)

pour les mains 'for the hands'

(58)

pourtoi 'for you'

(59)

c'est pour les jambes 'this is for the legs'

2; 10,28 2;9,18 2;11,21

Christophe (60)

pourmamie 'for granny'

2; 10,3

(61)

pourlamaison 'for the house'

3;4,23

German

Ivar (62)

jetzt machen wir ein hoch türm für die kirche (=jetzt machen wir einen hohen Turm für die Kirche) 'now we are going to build a high tower for the church'

3;2,28

Christophe (63)

für einen diesen (=für einen/für diesen) 'for one this'

2;7,30

(64)

ich mach'musik für dir (=ich mache Musik für dich) play music for you'

3;4,22

(65)

für gar keinen 'for nobody'

3;8,26

(66)

für die garage 'for the garage'

3;8,26

3.6 Syntactic prepositions. As distinct from the semantically more autonomous prepositions I have discussed in the preceding sections, there exists a number of prepositions that have a purely syntactic function

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141

(e.g., certain obligatory combinations of verbs, nouns or adjectives and prepositions), and which cannot be deduced from their meaning by the first language learners. These prepositions will be called syntactic prepositions. Within this group I will discuss in more detail prepositions that serve as case markers, i.e., prepositional objects, and prepositions that form an obligatory unit with certain verbs. 3.6.1 Units of verbs and prepositions. Our data lead us to conclude that, as a rule, the acquisitional sequence of prepositions seems initially to be determined by semantic criteria, which are only gradually replaced by grammatical features. However, the 'syntactical prepositions depend fully on the verb and do not contain meaning but have a purely grammatical function' (Grimm 1975:111).15 In fact, the syntactic prepositions represent a major acquisitional difficulty for the first language learner, as the child must figure out just what aspects of a particular notion are encoded in the respective target language, and what means are used for the encoding without "the help of meaning'. In doing so, the child may well be led to search for meaning differences, resulting in false hypotheses and prolonged patterns of confused acquisition. The relative ease of acquisition of the preceding, mostly locative, prepositions is not repeated. Thus, this kind of preposition is normally not present until the age of about 3;4 - 4;0, i.e., after most of the other prepositions of the current study and their corresponding use have already been acquired, and at a developmental stage when the child has separated the two linguistic systems in question. In sum, their documented usage is small in absolute terms and the variety revealed, quite limited. Interestingly enough, no incorrect usages appear in the corpus, which seems to support the hypothesis of a purely grammatical learning with regard to the properties of the target systems, i.e., the unit formed by a verb and its respective preposition. French There are only few occurrences of such obligatory units in Caroline's utterances. (67)

c'estfermeäclef 'it is locked (up)'

3;9,8

(68)

c'estenfrancais 'this is in French'

4;4,12

The same applies for the data from Ivar. (69)

eile a ecrase par une vorture (=elle a 6te ecrase par une voiture) 'she was hit by a car'

3;3,12

(70)

je donne pas ä Natascha (=je le donne pas ä Natascha) do not give to Natascha'

3;3,12

142

Two First Languages

Syntactic prepositions ofthat kind are not documented in the French recordings of Christophe. German The units formed by a verb and its respective preposition are seen somewhat earlier in the German than in the French data. Caroline and Ivar even seem to acquire the grammatical use of vor in the linguistic unit Angst haben vor 'to be afraid of before the locative use of vor 'in front of. But this sequence does not reflect the normal acquisitional pattern (cf. Appendix, Table 1-3). Caroline (71) ich hab' angst vor dich (=ich habe Angst vor dir) am afraid of you'

3;0,2

(72)

das ist aus papier (=das ist aus Papier gemacht) 'that is (made) out of paper'

4; 10,11

(73)

verwandeln in (=das soll sich verwandeln in) 'turn to/change into'

4; 10,11

Ivar uses syntactic prepositions by the age of 3;4,23. They, however, occur rarely. (74)

das schimpf(en) mit mama (=der schimpft mit Mama) 'he shout at mom'

3;4,23

(75)

du mußt nicht angst vor die [schindkröte] haben (=du mußt keine Angst vor der Schildkröte haben) 'you need not be afraid of the turtle'

3;4,23

The data of Christophe reveal only one possible syntactic preposition of the kind mentioned above at the age of 3;6,18. Whether this is a purely grammatical use, or whether it is still motivated semantically in the beginning, cannot be said definitely. As the combination spielen mit 'to play with' has a broad semantic base in the child's communicative contexts, as regards persons and objects, I would rather argue for a gradual "process of voiding of semantic meaning" as suggested by Grimm (1975:112). 3.6.2 Case marking. Let us now consider the issue of case marking by bilingual children as far as prepositions are concerned.16 The two languages under investigation differ in many respects in the matter of case marking. In German, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles receive case marking. Only the personal pronouns, however, display an unambiguous marking system, whereas the morphological markers reveal a syncretism of case, number, and gender marking.

Klinge: Prepositions

143

Furthermore, several German prepositions require either the dative or the accusative case (cf. Clahsen1984). Only the French personal pronouns reveal a system simlar to the German. Nouns, adjectives, and articles are not inflected. The functions ascribed to the German inflectional system are mainly expressed by prepositions. Direct objects are not marked; indirect objects, however, are marked by either ä or de, or the respective grammatical forms required by the syntactic contexts. Neither number and gender marking interact with case marking. Following up on related suggestions by Meisel (1986), the French data permits some of the early prepositions, a, pour and later on de, to be classified as functional words, i.e., terms whose primary function may be a syntactic one. There may be reasons for ascribing a syntactic status to these prepositions (cf. Gordon, 1985; Howe, 1981), but at least two factors suggest caution. First, the data offer only a limited variety of examples due to the age of the subjects and the fact that only spontaneous utterances have been analyzed. Second, syntactic knowledge is demonstrated when there is syntactic uniformity amid semantic variety. For the time being, there seems to be no way of knowing definitely whether these prepositions serve as case markers, as in adult language, or whether the child is operating with the semantic notions benefactive or locative, etc. In the early stages of first language acquisition this close interplay of syntactic and semantic factors thus results in severe problems with regard to the distinction between, for example, locative and possessive, both being encoded with similar syntactic structures containing the preposition ä, or somewhat later, between possessive and benefactive. In the course of acquisition, for all of the children analyzed, prepositional case marking is documented ahead of inflectional marking for both languages in question, i.e., if the respective target system allows for both, either prepositional or inflectional

marking, there is a clear

preference for the former. The children obviously prefer a high degree of perceptual salience and functional unambiguousness as regards their development of case marking systems (cf. Slobin, 1973). There is, however, a difference between French and German which reflects formal properties of the two target systems. At the beginning, up to approximately the age of 3;0, French as well as German PR's frequently lack articles with a slight predominance in utterances from the German corpus. With regard to French, this syntactic gap is filled fairly quickly and almost totally, except for some minor problems concerning the fusion of de + le instead of du. The children, however, continue struggling to fulfil the requirements of the German target system weeks later. It is important to note that, even when virtually all the respective German prepositions are correct, there still are a considerable number of incorrect articles. Obviously, the German system of gender assignment requires a more involved learning strategy than the French one.17 The still unanswered question, which I will leave to further research on first language acquisition, concerns the possible interplay between incorrect German articles and the differentiation of local or directional relations expressed by prepositions.

144

Two First Languages One further point must be dealt with in this section, namely, the acqu/sitional sequence of

dative and accusative. In this respect, the results of Meisel (1986) correlate to a high degree with my own findings. It is evident that the children acquire the linguistic system for marking the dative and the accusative at approximately the same stage of linguistic development. As the German article is frequently incorrect or missing, one often has to decide on ambiguous utterances with the help of the syntactic, i.e., on the basis of the respective verb, or situational context (which is fairly exact as the subjects were video-taped). German prepositions that are exclusively used to encode the dative show almost no incorrect occurrences, whereas prepositions that can be used either with the dative or the accusative cause a certain number of divergent uses.

French Table 7: Case marking with prepositions (Caroline) Age/MLU 2,09

P + N/NP (a+N)

Pronoun (ä + qui)

Other

3,20

a +N de le + N(poss.) du + N(poss.)

amoi

pour + N avec + N

3,16

a +N

ätoi

pour moi pour + N

3,68

a +N du + N(gen.) de le + N (gen.)

arnoi

pour moi pour + N

3,78

du + N(gen.) de le + N(gen.)

älui leur

pour moi pour + N

5,61

de la + N(gen.) de les + N(gen.)

ä moi de moi älui äelle äqui

pour moi pour nous pour + N/NP avec moi avec eile avec + N P

ämoi de qui ätoi de toi

pour moi pour toi avec moi avec eile avec + NP

< 5;0

145

Klinge: Prepositions Table 8: Case marking with prepositions (Ivar) AgelMLU 1,41

P + N/NP

1,33

ä t M de + N(poss.)

(76)

ä dame (=ä la dame) Of the woman' [jita] (de) papa (=la guitarre de papa) 'guitar of dad'

(77)

Pronoun

pour + N avec + N

3,51

ä+N de + N (DOSS.)

(78)

montrer ä Natascha (=je le montre ä Natascha) 'show to Natascha' le panda de papa 'the panda of dad'

(79)

4,90

6,01 (80) (81)

Other

ä+N pour + N(acc.) de le + N(poss.)

ä moi

pour toi avec + N

ä+N pour + N (ace.) de + N (dat.)

a moi

pour toi avec + N

moi je le pere de Jens (=moi je suis le pere de Jens) the father of Jens' non c'est le bus de moi 'no this is my bus'

ä moi de moi ä toi avec moi avec quoi avec lui

6,67

ä+N pour + N(acc.)

(82)

c'est pour les petits 93 'that is for the little ones'

pour toi pour + NP avec + NP

146

Two First Languages Table 9: Case marking with prepositions (Christophe)

Age/MLU 1,61

P + N/NP

Pronoun

2,71

2,69

2,51

3,15

2,14

pour moi pour toi pour + NP avec moi avec toi avec + NP

German Table 10: Case markino. with prepositions (Caroline) Age/MLU 2,23

Prep.

Pron./dat.

3,08

in + N auf + NP für + NP

zu dir

3,62

in + N auf + NP für + NP

zu dir

zu + NP* auf + NP* von + N

zu dir

Pron./acc.

2,12

4,30 5,61 < 5;0

vor dich*

mit + N/NP* 711 -l-

NP

in + NP auf + NP

Klinge: Prepositions

147

Comment to table 10: The asterisk indicates that the child uses the wrong gender in a pronoun or article, which may be explained by the fact that the respective preposition is used for the dative and the accusative in the adult language, i.e., it should be interpretated as an error of gender assignment.

Table 11: Case marking with prepositions (Ivar) Age/MLU 1,68

Pron./acc.

Prep.

Pron./dat.

2,28 3,35

mit + N

4,29

für + N/NP* mit + N/NP* zu + N ohne + N

4,65

fi'ir -i- M/MD*

(83)

von mama 'from mom' von Barbara 'from Barbara'

auf + NP* mit + N/NP zu + NP* in + NP* von + N

(84) 5,68

(85) (86) (87)

mit mir bei mir

ihn

zu + NP* in + NP* für + NP auf + NP* von + NP*

mit dir zu mir

ich hab' vergessen zu ihn fragen (=ich habe vergessen ihn zu fragen) forgot to ask him' zu mir auch nicht 'neither to me' zu nee zu zu die zu die arbeit von deine mama (=nein, zu der Arbeit von deiner Mama) 'to no to to the to the work of your mom'

148

Two First Languages Table 12: Case marking with prepositions (Christophe)

AgejMW

Pron./acc.

Prep.

Pron./dat.

in -t- MP*

->2,64 3,58

mit + NP* für + NP

3,65

auf + N/NP*

4,02

zu + NP* in + N/NP* an + N mit + NP

zu mir zu dir

zu + NP* mit + NP* auf + NP* in + NP von + N/NP für + N/NP* vor + NP

mit mir mit dir

< 4;0 ->4,71

für dich für dir*

4. CONCLUSION. The acquisition of a grammatical competence seems to be an independent stage of cognitive development, that is nonetheless embedded in and prompted by the specific contexts of the child's communicative interaction. In view of this, the process of coming to grips with grammatical features, which, in certain acquisitional stages, amounts to a conflict between grammatical and semantic-pragmatic encoding methods, is of particular interest, and is also acutely relevant to the question of how the child learns prepositions. As the child's repertoire of semanticpragmatic functions should be at the same developmental level for both languages, formal differences during particular stages of language acquisition could be taken as evidence of grammatical principles determining the organization of the child's linguistic systems. The current study was an attempt to investigate lexical acquisition processes for words other than content words, of which a good deal is already known. If we are to determine the full range of the child's lexical acquisition skills, we have to examine how the child manages to extract these relational words from the target language(s), and how the mapping process proceeds as regards linguistic means and the respective concepts. The language learner is acquiring a system which is characterized by a constant interplay of the specific properties of the subcomponents. It seems

Klinge: Prepositions

149

that from the beginning of language acquisition, the child is alert to that componential property of language, and struggles to work out the distinct categories, e.g., content words and function words. In the course of acquisition, some categories are learned before others, and within a particular category some criteria are met before others, which applies also to the functor class of prepositions. On the whole, the revealed sequence of acquisition corresponds fairly well with our predictions made on conceptual grounds. Within the course of acquisition, the children build up a repertoire of, first of all, locative prepositions, whose internal structure is characterized by a preference for local over directional uses for the period under investigation. And, as regards cognitive development, the children start by encoding topological spatial relations before they master euclidian terms. The substitutions and omissions within this group confirm the central role of some of them as regards the first language learner's communicative contexts. These were not only acquired first, but revealed also the highest number of omissions, even when they were already part of the learner's repertoire (almost all omissions were recorded after the first productive uses). Only the temporal prepositions, i.e. the temporal use of already acquired locative ones, show discrepancies in the developmental order claimed by other studies on first language acquisition. They do not occur right after the locatives, but follow several prepositions expressing instrumental, comitative, or benefactive relations. Following up related suggestions, it seems as if the acquisition of mit, respectively avec 'with', and ohne 'without' is partly related to the process of deictic detachment. Whereas the children use the "positive" term already in early stages of linguistic development, its counterpart emerges far later at a developmental stage, in which the children are able to distinguish between the perceptible object or person and implicit alternative states. The children, however, seem to lack different constituents for different reasons. In this respect it is instructive to analyze the later learned so-called syntactic prepositions, which reveal a somewhat different type of acquisitional pattern. As these prepositions have a purely grammatical function, the first language learner has to employ some kind of analytic learning strategy, comparing linguistic structures over time (Peters, 1985). Thus, the child has to acquire them without the help of meaning, which leads to a prolonged period of acquisition, and places these prepositions at the end of the sequence. The data reveal no omissions or substitutions within these prepositions, which may be taken as evidence of a learning process that clearly reflects properties of the respective target languages. The picture emerging from the present study does not provide a clear answer, however, to the question of the point at which the child separates neatly the syntactic function of prepositional case markers and the implicit semantic notions of the prepositions involved. Thus, it is rather speculative for the time being to suggest that the children use their syntactic knowledge of

150

Two First Languages

categories and distributional regularities to learn how to express their concepts linguistically from the earliest stages of language acquisition. 5. APPENDIX.

Table 1 : Acauisitional segyence of German prepositions Caroline Age Preposition Use local/directional/syntactic/temporal 02;02,09 auf benefactive/temporal/syntactic 02;03,1 1 für 02;05,04 unter local directional/local/temporal/syntactic 02;05,18 zu comitative/instrumental/syntactic 02;05,18 mit local/directional/temporal/syntactic 02;06,08 in 02:06,08 an local 02;07,06 (local)/directional/syntactic von 02;08,19 auf local/temporal 02;10,00 aus local/syntactic 03;00,02 syntactic/local vor 03;03,17 nach (local)/directional 03:04,07 neben local 03:08,25 bei local/syntactic 04:01,05 hinter local 04:04,12 local/syntactic über 04;06,01 local/directional/temporal bis The words in brackets indicate the child's (first) use which is incorrect as regards the target language. Table 1: Acauisitional sequence of French prepositions Caroline Age Preposition Use 01; 11,04 ä possessive/local/syntactic/directional 02:00,09 pour benefactive/temporal 02:00,09 dans local/directional 02;01,26 avec instrumental/comitative 02:02,09 sur local/directional 02:10,28 de possessive/local/syntactic 03:08,11 au dessous(de) local 03; 10,21 en local/directional/syntactic 03:10,21 chez local/directional 04;01,05 derriere local

Klinge: Prepositions

151

Table 2: Acquisitional sequence of German prepositions Ivar Age Preposition Use 02;02,07 in local/directional/temporal 02;02,07 auf local/sytactic 02;04,09 mit instrumental/comitative/syntactic 02;07,17 für benef active 02;07,17 nach (local)/directional 02;08,15 zu directional/syntactic 02;09,18 ohne comitative 02; 10,24 über local/directional 02; 10,24 an local 02; 10,24 aus local/syntactic 02; 10,24 bei local 03;01,03 von syntactic 03;04,23 vor syntactic Table 2: Acauisitional sequence of French prepositions

Ivar Age 02;09,29 02;04,09 02;05,07 02;05,07 02;06,06 02;07,17 02;09,18 02; 10,24 02; 10,24 03;02,28 03;03,12

Preposition ä de avec dans pour sous sur presde chez -en par

Use local/possessive/directional/syntactic possessive/directional instrumental/comitative/syntactic local/directional benefactive local local local directional/local local syntactic

Table 3: Acquisitional sequence of German prepositions Christophe Age Preposition Use 02;04,01 in local/directional 02;04,01 auf local/directional 02;06,19 unter local 02;08,21 mit instrumental/comitative/syntactic 02; 10,16 an local 03;00,04 über local 03;00,04 zu directional/local 03;03,07 nach directional/(local) 03;03,07 bei local 03;03,21 urn local 03;04,22 für benefactive 03;06,18 von directional/syntactic 03;07,28 vor local

152

Two First Languages

Table 3: Acauisitional seauence of French prepositions Christophe Age Preposition Use 02;02,29 ä possessive/local/directional 02;03,16 dans local/directional 02;03,16 en* local 02;10,03 pour benefactive 02; 10,03 la-dessus local 02;10,16 sous local 02;11,16 sur local 03;03,07 avec instrumental/comitative 03;03,21 chez local 03;06,18 derriere local *lt is hard to decide whether Christophe ever uses this preposition syntactically, as it occurs rarely and only in one single expression en France 'in France', which seems to be lexical learning.

6. FOOTNOTES. 1. The semantic content of prepositions is determined mainly by their syntactic environment (e.g. two NP's). That is, the different contexts control the prepositions' semantic density. 2. The use of grammatical markers should make semantic sense. (Slobin, 1973:34) 3. Languages differ - at least for the preschooler - not so much in what can be said, but in how things are to be said. There is always a temporal gap between the emergence of a communicable notion in a child and his/her mastery of the proper means for the encoding of the intention linguistically. The duration of this lag in acquisition is determined by structural features of the language which affect the ease of perceiving the relevant forms or discovering mapping conventions between form and content. (Johnston & Slobin, 1979:530) 4. That is, the generalization of the euclidian spatial concept in which the idea of closeness, or limits, is described in terms of relationships between sets rather than in terms of distance. 5. Our three-dimensional environment provides a euclidian framework for our perception of spatial relations. The external euclidian cues to these relations may be broadly categorized as static, if the observer is stationary, or dynamic, as when he moves or when the objects move with respect to one another in the same surroundings. Although object relations in the environment can be described in terms of the euclidian coordinate system, it is not clear that such a coordinate system offers the best framework for describing human spatial perception. The euclidian space is around us but we operate in terms of an egocentric coordinate system. Whenever we "reorient", our egocentric coordinates undergo some translation. Our specification for the coordinate system, however, must be such that any transformation we are likely to make should leave the spatial relations within the coordinate system invariant. Only if the relations our own brain is attempting to interpret remain invariant under translations of our coordinate system, will we have a stable world. 6. As for example: - the substitution of locatives with locatives — local with local ones — directional with directional ones — local with directional ones and vice versa - the substitution of locatives with non-locatives - the substitution of temporals with temporals etc. 7. In their analysis on child language Stern & Stern (1907) documented the use of a single, overextended preposition - the so-called "Universalpräposition" (= universal preposition) - which

Klinge: Prepositions

153

precedes all other prepositions in time of acquisition and frequency of usage, serving the child in prepositional contexts before he/she masters the proper linguistic means of the target language for the encoding. 8. The English versions of the French and German sentences are not always exact translations, often they are not even grammatically correct. They are principally meant to help in understanding the linguistic phenomena being discussed. 9. The expression of spatial relations is already documented for all three children in earlier stages of language acquisition. These relations are encoded either as (deictic) adverbs or, later on, as syntactic structures - one would expect them to be PP in view of their semantic and syntactic contexts - without a preposition. Such uses may surface as combinations of the type: N + N, V + N, or in German also as: verbal particle + N. 10. As I have already mentioned before, only the productive competence of the children is taken into consideration, i.e., no additional experimental data of their receptive linguistic abilities was analyzed. It seems, however, that the emergence of the notions expressed by this kind of preposition is somewhat earlier than the actual linguistic encoding. There seem to be no structural reasons for this acquisitional delay but one can infer cognitive difficulties due to developmental stages (cf. Piaget & Inhelder, 1975). 11. The German prepositions nach 'to' and zu 'to' seem to cause acquisitional problems for all of the children investigated in this study. Though they are formally distinct, they share many aspects of their semantic content. Both are directional locatives that can be used either with places (nach) or activities (zu), e.g. Ich gehe nach Berlin/Frankreich. Ί goto Berlin/France/ Ich gehe nach Hause.' I go home.' Ich gehe zum Theater. Ί go to the theatre.' Ich gehe zum Spielen. Ί go out to play.' Besides, zu can be used in a local sense, e.g. Ich bin zu Hause. Ί am at home/ Ich bin zu Tisch. Ί am at table (=lt is my lunchtime.)' Moreover, zu can be used as a directional locative with persons, e.g. Ich gehe zu meiner Freundin/meinem Bruder. Ί go to my girl friend/my brother.' Ich gehe zu Peter. Ί go to Peter.' All children tend to overextend the preposition zu in contexts where German adult language would require nach, though never vice versa. On the one hand it may be somewhat easier for the child to discover mapping conventions between form and function for zu, as this preposition appears with a high frequency as a free and invariant morpheme in the input, whereas, in early stages of acquisition, nach is documented far less (both for child and adult) and mostly in combinations as Er fahrt/geht nach Hause. 'He drives/goes home.'and only rarely as e.g. Er geht/fahrt nach Hamburg 'He goes/drives to Hamburg'. The former can also be encoded as Er fahrt/geht nachhause in German written language, which may inr':cate a general developmental tendency from PP to Adv that is possibly reflected in the child's acquisitional difficulties. On the other hand, many adult speakers, especially of southern German varieties make mistakes with regard to standard language when using these prepositions. This, however, can be regarded as a marginal input factor as far as the children of this study are concerned, as it took place in the north of Germany (the child would hear but a very small number of tokens of this kind). 12. This could possibly also be a conjunction construction. 13. H. Grimm (1975) argues that, if terms overlap, the child cannot be sure of what the precise meaning of each might be, which leads to substitutions or interferences and which, as a consequence, may cause a prolonged sequence of acquisition. 14. The example also allows for a local interpretation, e.g., 'At my birthday party.' The question of whether these utterances should be counted as a locative or temporal usage of the respective preposition is strongly dependent on the problem of the semantic autonomy of prepositions in

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Two First Languages

general. I tend to a rather liberal interpretation of ambiguous utterances of the kind previously mentioned. 15. "Bei der Klassifikation der P (Präpositionen, d.Vfin) hat sich die Unterscheidung in regierte und nichtregierte P durchgesetzt. Dabei wird ihre Funktion wie folgt charakterisiert: Ein großer Teil von Präpositionen, vorwiegend im abstrakten Bereich, ist obligatorisch bestimmten Verben, Adjektiven oder Substantiven zugeordnet. Diese regierten Präpositionen haben nur eine syntaktische Funktion. Ihre semantische Funktion ist in der Gegenwartsprache nicht mehr durchschaubar.· (Kühne, 1983:48) 16. For a detailed analysis of the development of case marking systems see Chapter 7 in this volume. 17. For further information on the development of the gender assignment systems of French and German see Chapter 8 in this volume.

CHAPTER 7

THE ACQUISITION OF WORD ORDER REGULARITIES AND CASE MORPHOLOGY

Teresa Parodl

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Two First Languages

1. BACKGROUND. 1.1. Introduction.1 The aim of this paper is to find out whether the initial word combinations of children are organized according to some principle (or a number of principles) and to determine what that principle is. Even at such an early stage of language acquisition, children adopt explicit morphosyntactic strategies (such as word order and morphological marking) to express relations between words. A close examination of these strategies should provide a more or less clear picture of how their grammar is internally organized. Research in these areas could provide information about the extent to which the acquisition of grammatical competence is triggered by functional necessity, or whether the formal properties of language constitute an independent domain of acquisition that is not necessarily functionally controlled. In the 60's and 70's, word order was ascribed special relevance as a basic syntactic device (Slobin, 1973). Later cross-linguistic studies showed that even two-year-olds (speakers of Turkish and of Serbo-Croatian) avail themselves of case inflection in the perception and organization of early grammars (Slobin, 1982a; Slobin, 1982b; Slobin & Bever, 1982). Canonical sentence Schemas are the starting point for later linguistic organization. Such canonical sentence Schemas show the typical characteristics of the adult language and provide a framework for the perception and production of further, non-canonical utterances (Slobin, 1982a; Slobin, 1982b; Slobin & Bever, 1982). A functional relationship between the development of word order and case morphology in German has been observed by Clansen (1984). According to his hypothesis, word order as a means of distinguishing arguments loses its importance as soon as verb-second position becomes syntactically motivated. The need for case morphology as an additional marker grows. The acquisition of word order regularities and of case markings may be discussed within the wider context of the general aims of the OUFOE project, namely: a) At what point can grammatical codings be verified? b) Does the bilingual child construct two language-specific systems (German and French), and, if so, at what point in time and at what stage of development? Possible criteria for the verification of grammatical codings can be formal regularities of any kind, such as word order or specific choice of the categories to be combined. For example, Radford (1986)^ observes that child utterances show the structure of adult small clauses. He sees similarities in the lack of functional categories - COMP and INFL - as opposed to lexical categories, and in the properties that result. Morphological criteria, as used, for example, by Valian (1986), provide another method of identifying syntactic categories. However, these apply

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only after a certain age, since overt and productive morphology is lacking in early child utterances. But formal regularities can be detected before the appearance of morphology, as Radford observes. 1.2. Database. The bilingual acquisition of word order regularities and case morphology is studied in the current paper based on the data of the child Chr between the ages of 1 ;11 and 3;8. This child gave up French temporarily after 2;5. The language was later taken up again at 3;3 and developed rather rapidly, and then weakened again. This imbalance makes it possible to study the question of language-specific phenomena. Does the child pass through similar stages of development in German and in French? During the period in which the child does not speak French, has he forgotten the language, or has he retained what was once available? An 'unsuccessful' development can provide interesting answers to these questions. These considerations form the background for the choice of the recordings to be analyzed. Since practically every utterance from the two-word stage onwards can be used to examine word order, it is not possible to analyze each of the recordings which have taken place every two weeks. Thus the analysis is based on one recording per month in the early stages (up to the beginning of the multi—word stage), and later on an average of one recording every three months. At certain important stages, however, i.e. when some especially interesting development takes place, every recording is analyzed. Emphasis was placed on the stages in which French was dropped and then taken up again, as well as on the periods before and after that. Of particular interest during this time was the weakness of French on the one hand and the general development of German on the other. For the early stage, up to the age of 2;5, the data of a second child, Iv, were considered. In what follows I begin with an analysis of word order and later I examine case morphology.

2. WORD ORDER.

A large number of very different phenomena are relevant for an analysis of word order. Besides the order of arguments in the main clause, one may consider the order of elements within the NP, the VP, subordinate clause and questions, as well as the position of the negative marker. In this paper I will restrict myself to the position of arguments with respect to the predicate in declarative sentences.

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Two First Languages

2.1. Word order in German. Most authors working in the framework of generative grammar consider German to be an SOV language having the following structure (cf. Grewendorf et al., 1987):3

(1) SpecC

ob die Vase auf dem Tisch 'whether the vase on the table (whether the vase stood on the table)

gestanden stood

hat has'

The clause-final position of verbs in a German sentence is base-generated by the phrase structure rules. This is the canonical position in subordinate clauses. In main clauses, non-finite verbs and verbal particles also occur in clause-final position: (2)

die Vase hat auf dem Tisch gestanden 'the vase has on the table stood' (the vase stood on the table)

(3)

ich ziehe den Mantel an Ί put the coat on' (I put on my coat)

Finite verbs take second position in the sentence by being moved into the C position, which is empty in main clauses. A maximal projection, for example a subject NP, is placed into the SpecC position. If any constituent other than the subject is moved into the SpecC position, then the subject cannot be moved and remains in the position in which it was generated.

161

Parodi: Word Order and Case Morphology (4)

heute ziehe ich den Mantel an 'today put I the coat on' (today I put on my coat)

2.2. Word order in French. French is an SVO language for which the following structure is assumed (Rizzi, 1986):

(5) SpecC

mange 'he eats (he eats apples)

des pornmes some apples'

However, the structure of INFL and which elements are found in INFL is not clear.4 For example, whereas Rizzi (1986) places subject clitics under [NP, IP] and in Kayne (1983) dislocated NPs appear in the SpecC position, it may also be possible that subject clitics are AGR features under INFL (Kaiser & Meisel, to appear)5. Object clitics always appear preverbally, which results in a deviation from the SVO sequence. Chomsky (1988, following Kayne, 1987 and Pollock, 1989 for INFL) assumes an AGR-O position in French to which object clitics are raised.6

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Two First Languages IP

(6) NP

(negP)

neg

AGR-P

,VP

AGR-O

NP moi je 'me I (I don't want to do it)

veux want

pas not

le it

faire to do'

When two object clitics appear, the ordering rules are very complex; however, we need not concern ourselves with that, since children do not produce such sentences in the period under consideration. Unlike German, there is no VS sequence in French. There is in principle SV inversion in questions, but this has almost disappeared in the spoken language (Behnstedt, 1973).

2.3. Acquisition of Word Order Regularities In German. Studies on the acquisition of German by monolinguals (Clahsen, 1982b, 1988c; Mills, 1985) report an initial stage of free word order, in which verb-final position is preferred. In this twoword stage (Mills, 1985:154) most verbs are not inflected. Later (according to Clahsen, 1982b) inflected verbs occur usually in second position and only rarely in final position. Uninflected verbs, on the other hand, appear only in final position. According to Mills (1985:156), 'auxiliaries and modals begin to appear and are placed correctly in second position, with the main verb then in final position." Clahsen reports a stage immediately after this in which the inflected verb occurs exclusively in second position, i.e. the INFL element has moved out of the underlying final position. Finally, subordinate clauses appear, imrrjediately displaying correct word order (Clahsen, 1982b; Mills, 1985). Errors are only found in complex verb groups.

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2.4. Acquisition of Word Order Regularities in French7. Concerning the development of word order in monolingual French children, I will rely on the work of Clark (1985), who evaluates older data. Clark reports that young children acquiring French show 'considerable variation in the word order" (Clark, 1985:709). This statement refers to word order from the two-word stage onwards, involving the three-word stage as well. Individual variation seems to play a role in affecting the extent to which SV(O) sequences are adhered to. At any rate, many "deviations" from the SVO sequence can be seen as a reflex of adult dislocations. For example, Guillaume (1927a) interprets fermee fenetre 'closed (fern.) window' as an imitation of eile est fermee. la fenetre 'it is closed, the window'.This could be a possible interpretation of the following sentences of Descoeudres (1922): (7)

a passe tram mord le vouvou chercher le jus moi

'has passed tram' ' bites the dog' ' look for the juice me'8

When the child acquires personal pronouns, utterances with a dislocated subject become very frequent. Clark quotes from Guillaume (1927a): Pierre il sait 'P he knows', Pierre il petit pas 'P he cannot' (at the age of 1,8). According to Virbel (1975; quoted by Clark), such utterances are strongly dominant between 4 and 9. On the other hand, dislocated objects are much rarer. The position of object clitics creates problems for children, since they are confronted with complex rules, especially when several pronouns appear simultaneously. 2.5. Word Order Regularities of Bilinguals. In his study of two bilingual German-French children, Meisel (1986) observes the following differences between these bilingual and monolingual children: At the beginning, the bilinguals show a less variable word order in German than monolingual German children. Bilinguals prefer the SVO pattern in the multiple word stage. They do not make ordering "errors" in topicalized constituents, i.e. there is no XSVY sequence with the verb in third position. While monolingual German children acquire the subordinate clause order without errors, some bilinguals use the SVO order in subordinate clauses.9 The comparison with French monolinguals is more difficult, since the available information is based on less reliable data. At the initial stage, bilinguals seem to use less variable word order than monolingual French children. While monolingual French children prefer subject final position, such a preference is not to be found in bilinguals. For them, the SVO pattern is strongly dominant. For monolingual French children, the SsVO1 ° pattern (left dislocation) is reported to be strongly dominant; the pattern is also used by bilinguals, but it appears less frequently.

164

Two First Languages

With this background, I now return to the questions raised at the beginning of this paper, basing the discussion on a detailed analysis of a bilingual child. The following questions are to be answered: At what age is it possible to verify word order regularities? At what age is it possible to verify syntactic processing?

3. CHR'S WORD ORDER REGULARITIES.

I distinguish three stages in the linguistic development of Chr: I. Age 2;2,17-2;4,25: The child is in the two-word stage both in German and in French. Development is parallel in both languages. II. Age 2;6,7-3;0,4: During this period, it is not possible to analyze French word order, since French utterances only consist of a single constituent, sometimes appearing in a German utterance. In German, the multi-word stage begins at this point. Between the ages 3;0,4 and 3;3,4, the recordings are stopped since the child speaks practically no French at all. When he resumes speaking the language, the recordings continued. III. Age 3;3,4-3;8,26: there is evidence for subordinate clauses in German. When the child resumes French, he is in the multi-word stage. French develops further for a while, and then weakens again. In the following I will discuss these stages in detail. 3.1. Stage I. Due to the similar structural properties of the child's German and French in this stage, I will treat them together here. Typical German utterances during this stage are: (8)

daalat(=salat) 'there salad'

2;2,17

Parodi: Word Order and Case Morphology

165

(9)

traurig auch chrein (=schwein) 'sad also pig' (the pig is also sad)

2;3,16

(10)

diesen auch runter 'this one also down' (this one will fall down too)

2;4,11

(11)

titi n bonbon11 (titi=Chr) 'titi n sweet' (for Chr a sweet)

2;4,25

(12)

a fähr a rot 'a drive a red' (Chr is driving the red car)

2;4,25

In French, Chr produces utterances like the following: (13)

itioitur(=icivoiture) 'here car'

2;4,25

(14)

rouge, maison 'red, house'

2;4,25

(15)

wasser canard 'water duck' (the duck is in the water)

2;4,25

(16)

e ga e voiture 'e this e car'

2;4,25

(17)

pati, un rain (=train) 'gone a train'

2;3,16

An NP appears in all of these utterances, realized either as a noun or a pronoun (ga, das), as a rule, in final position. Besides the NP, another constituent occurs that is realized by one of the following (adult grammar) categories: verb, adjective, adverb, noun, a verbal particle in German and past participle in French. These different categories behave syntactically in the same way and thus form a class that can be called XP.12 One can conclude that the child has formed two syntactic classes: an NP class and XP class. The elements of the latter class are predicates, and those of the NP class are their arguments. Syntactically, predicates are realized by the above mentioned categories as well as by NPs, such as in the following utterances: (18)

titi n bonbon 'Chr a sweet'

2;4,25

(19)

wasser canard 'water duck'

2;4,25

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Two First Languages

Semantically, the child distinguishes between objects and properties. Predicates relate their object arguments to other objects and specify them in terms of quality, space, or time. The object 'bonbon' is brought into relation with another object in the first example, and the object "canard" is specified with respect to space in the second. One can think of them as copular sentences in which the copula is missing: (ist fürt Titi. 'is for Chr', (ist im) Wasser, 'is in the water'. The predicative character would be clearer if the copula were realized, but its absence cannot be taken as proof of the fact that the relation between the elements involved is not one of predication.13 It is not necessary to assume the existence of a VP with an empty head. The XP is the projection of a phrase that can function as a predicate. It is an underspecified maximal projection and should not be identified with VP. In this connection, it is interesting to compare both Stowell's (1981) and Chomsky's (1981) approach to small clauses, in which any lexical category can be the head of the predicate phrase. As far as word order regularities are concerned, the quantitative tables 1 and 2 show that the XP (predicate) for this child is generally located in clause-initial position, both in German and in French.14 An examination of the utterances of another child, Iv, shows some interesting similarities and differences. Consider the following data: German: (20)

dede such 'teddy seek' (you) look for the teddy

2;0,29

(21)

öckchen such (=stöckchen) 'tick seek' (the stick is looking for the teddy)

2;3,5

(22)

mama [e] such 'mommy seeks' (mommy is looking for it/them)

2;5,7

(23)

such auch mama 'seek also mommy' (mommy is also looking for it/them)

2;5,7

French: (24)

[go]nounoursdort(=gros) 'big teddy sleeps' (big teddy is asleep)

2;0,29

(25)

maman donn[e] 'mommy given' (I've given it to mommy)

2;3,5

(26)

petit nounours trap[e] pas (=attraper,6) 'little teddy catch not' (you can't catch the little teddy)

2;3,5

Parodi: Word Order and Case Morphology

167

These utterances exhibit similar syntactic and semantic properties: they consist of an NP and XP, where the XP is a predicate and the NP is an argument. As for word order, however, Iv prefers the NP-XP sequence, although he also uses XP NP. The question is whether word order is determined by syntactic function or by some other means. It is not always possible to identify the syntactic function of the argument as subject or object, since in utterances like (20), (21), (23), (25) or (26) above, neither the position of the NP, nor the (lack of) morphology provide any clear evidence. One could claim that since in (24) the verb dort, 'sleeps' is a one-place predicate, the NP ' [go] nounours' must be the subject of the utterance. The thematic role of the argument, however, can be identified more easily and might play a part in determining the word order. Theme is the only thematic role that appears in Chr's utterances. In Iv's German utterances, the thematic role in the first case is theme, in the second case instrument, and in the third and fourth cases agent. Although the thematic roles differ, the first three examples display the same word order, whereas the agent thematic role appears once in initial position and once in final position. Thus thematic roles do not seem to determine word order. Furthermore, each child's preferred order is the same in both languages. We observe no significant differences between German and French. 3.2. Bedford's analysis. At this point I will turn to the analysis proposed by Radford (1986). According to this analysis, there are similarities between the small clauses of adult language and child utterances at an early stage. Radford (1986:6; following Stowell, 1981; Chomsky, 1981; Kayne, 1985) distinguishes between Ordinary clauses', which are projections of the grammatical categories I (=INFL) and C (=COMP), and 'small clauses'. The latter do not contain C or I, but are nevertheless clauses, since they are Subject+Predicate structures: more specifically, Small Clauses have the canonical structure [NP XP], where NP is the Subject, and XP is a Predicate Phrase which can be AP, PP, NP, and (perhaps) VPV Therefore, XP is not to be identified with VP; it is the maximal projection of a lexical category. Any lexical category can be its head. Radford gives the following examples of small clauses in adult English:

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Two First Languages

(27)

a. b. c. d. e. f.

I believe (the President incapable of deception I consider (John extremely intelligent) Exercise keeps (you fit) They want (Zola out of the team) Most people find (syntax a real drag) Let (there be light)

Thus, small clauses have the following properties, compared to ordinary clauses: COMP, proposed AUX and preposed WH-phrases are absent. This follows from the lack of the Csystem. They have no modal auxiliaries, tense- and agreement markers. This follows from the lack of the l-system. They do not require a VP since the obligatoriness of VP results from the fact that it is the complement of I. They lack nominative subjects, which are governed by I. They cannot be used independently. a) Ordinary clauses

b) Small clauses

CP XP

C'

NP

XP

C

NP "VP

Radford's hypothesis is that early child utterances are structurally similar to the small clauses of adults. They have the following properties (Radford, 1986:24): "(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) (vii) (viii) (ix) (x) (xi) (xii)

child clauses lack complementizers child clauses have no inverted Auxiliaries child clauses have no preposed wh-phrases child clauses lack infinitival to child clauses lack modal auxiliaries child clauses have particle negation child clauses lack tense child clauses lack agreement child clauses lack nominative subjects child clauses freely lack overt subjects child clauses may lack VP child independent clauses may be nonfinite."

According to Radford, these properties are to be explained by the fact that child utterances lack the C-system (properties (i)-(iii)) and the l-system (properties (iv)-(xii)). For Radford, this is ultimately due to the fact that clauses in adult language, unlike small clauses, are projections of

Parodi: Word Order and Case Morphology

169

the categories C and I. But children have only mastered lexical categories at this stage, and hence they form clauses in which only maximal projections of these lexical categories occur. The data given above for the children Chr and Iv are compatible with Bedford's analysis. They consist of nonfinite clauses that occur independently; they do not have complementizers, modal auxiliaries, tense, agreement, or VPs. As for subjects, the concept of subjects in ordinary clauses or in adult language is not valid here. As stated above, criteria that involve morphology or agreement are not applicable. In adult language, the subject position is structurally defined as [Spec, IP]. Since the internal structure of the IP and the XP are essentially identical, one can also identify the [Spec, XP] (the NP of a small clause) as the subject position. Radford also finds differences between the word order in small clauses of adults and that of child utterances.15 While adults' order is always NP XP, children also use the opposite order, XP NP. Radford claims that this occurs because the Case Filter does not operate at this stage of child language development. The Case Filter principle (Chomsky 1981) states that an NP is not well-formed if it is not assigned Case. Small clauses in adult language may only appear as complements of a few transitive verbs, which assign Case to the subject of the small clause. Since there is no INFL in the small clause, the subject cannot be assigned nominative Case clause-internally by the embedded verb. Following Stowell (1981), Radford mentions that Case assignment in English is subject to the strict adjacency condition: a transitive V or a transitive P can only assign objective Case to the immediately following NP. It follows from this that only small clauses with base generated NP XP order fulfill the condition (and not the ones with XP NP order). However, if the Case Filter is not active at an early stage of acquisition, then children would not necessarily generate the subject NP where it can receive Case. Now, the fact that children use both the NP XP and the XP NP order leads Radford to a further conclusion (1986:27): "some children acquire constituency rules (i.e. rules determining the constituents of clauses or phrases) independently of linearisation (i.e. word order) rules." Thus a child who uses both NP XP and XP NP order has learned that clauses are formed by an NP and an XP, but not which constituents assume which position. This conclusion is compatible with the data from Chr and Iv. I think that the difficulty in distinguishing syntactic functions like subject and object results from the fact that children do not make such a distinction. The child only needs to keep two types of phrases (XP and NP) apart. A distinction between arguments is not made, since only one argument is realized at this stage. There seems to be no preference for the position of different syntactic functions or of different thematic roles, but there is a preference for the position of the NP and XP classes. This may be evidence that word order serves to distinguish between the NP and XP classes at this stage. It

170

Two First Languages

does not mean that there is a violation of UG, but rather a lack of differentiation at this stage of linguistic development. 3.3. Stage II. 3.3.1. Stage II In German. Chr is in the multi-word stage. From the age of 2;6,7 onwards, an additional constituent is realized. The XP of the previous stage becomes a VP with an (inflected) verb. The utterances can in most cases be described as NVN. As table 1 shows, SVX order develops as the most frequent sentence order. In the first recording where an additional constituent occurs, the child repeats the same proposition with different word order: (28)

(e)n trink wasser (e)n hund '(e)n drink water (e)ndog' (the/a dog is drinking water)

2;6,7

(29)

wauwau trink wasser 'dog drink water' (the/a dog is drinking water)

2;6,7

Many of these occur in the French part of the recording. In these, the subject is realized in French, and the rest of the utterance in German. No French occurs in the German part of the recording. (30)

trink wasser un chien drink water a dog' (the dog is drinking water)

2;6,7

(31)

un taureau un trink wasser 'a bull a drink water' (the bull is drinking water)

2;6,7

The position of the subject varies, with a preference for final position. In the VP, however, the VX order is retained with one exception. The distribution of elements within this type of utterance is as follows: SVX G e Fr

r 3

VX/VnegX 3 4 2

VXS 1 4

SXV 1

At 2;8,21, SVX constructions are very frequent. Many of these (17 of 22) have the form das ist X, 'this is X'.

171

Faroe/;: Word Order and Case Morphology

W

χ > > χ W

1

1

1

1

iH

iH

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

iH

1

1

1

M

CN

> χ

1

1

1

1

iH

1

iH

iH •H

^


1

f

I

1

I

1

*Ο

"3·

CN

ιΗ

W

m

m

CN

ι—Ι

•Η

W

K,,

Ι

Ι

ι

ι

ιΗ

Ι

Ι

ι-Η

Ι

Π

I

X X

> X

> W

ο-

ι · —t r o r ^ ^ r ^ r ^ c N i o

• H I - H I

ι

ι ΐ Γ ) θ ο σ > ι ο ^ · ο ο (Ν

CS

Μ

ιΗ

Ι

Ι

Ι

ix

X Ι

ιΗ

If)

ιΗ

Ι

ιΗ

Ι

ιΗ

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Ό Η Ο U 0) Μ

IX

z

W C

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0) Ή

Ι

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z

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IX

+J Μ >α α

Ο

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Ή

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Ή

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ex

υ

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0) (L4

ω χ:

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ex z

^r

^Η

es

Ή

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in

ι

es

ι

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C

tu •

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i

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(0 C

N

C

N

^l

C N r s r s o i c s c N c s r n ' ^ r n n - ) · ! '

172

Two First Languages Structures specific to German also appear at this stage, which indicates that the V2 rule of

German has been acquired. One indication of this is the postverbal position of the subject when another constituent is brought into the SpecC position. XSVY sequences do not occur. (32)

da trink(t) der weiter 'there drinks he further' (he carries on drinking)

2;6,7

Another indication is the position of the finite and infinite verbal constituents. After a single occurrence at 2;3,16, the combination Modal+V appears regularly from 2;6,7 on. With one exception the modal is separated from V, in accordance with standard German. When they first occur, at 2;7,16, auxiliaries are separated from V. The same is true of V+ particle. (33)

n wollen trinken wasser 'n want drink water' (it/they want/s to drink water)

2;6,7

(34)

kann er parken (er=das Auto) 'can he park' (the car can park)

2;8,21

(35)

hab n bein weh ntan 'have n leg hurt n done' (I've hurt my leg)

2;7,16

(36)

brum. ich fahr wieder weg 'brum, I drive again away' (I'm driving away again)

2;8,21

All of this indicates that the child now has the categories I and C at his disposal. For word order, this means that constituents can now appear in the "correct" position. This is the stage at which his French is weak. Chr almost always answers the French interviewer in German. In these recordings, an obvious difference can be seen between the German part and the German utterances that the child produces as answers to the French interaction partner. While he is capable of producing relatively complex utterances in German at age 3;0,4, the structure das ist X. 'it is X', occurs frequently in the French part. Earlier, at 2;8,21, this was also very frequent in German. An explanation for this observation is still pending. A further point is the relationship between word order and thematic roles.

One could

assume that children initially prefer positional markings to morphological ones. This assumption could be tested using transitive sentences by checking whether children reserve a certain position in the sentence for a certain thematic role, such as a preverbal position for agent.

Parodi: Word Order and Case Morphology

173

At 2;6,7, the thematic role agent appears for the first time (in the utterance X trink wasser. 'X drink/s water'). A preference for preverbal position of the agent role vs. postverbal position for the theme role is not clear: agent appears both pre- and postverbally (see above). SVX order does not appear to be motivated by this. On the contrary, it can be derived from the presence of the categories C and I. 3.3.2. Stage III in German. In the period between 3;0,4 and 3;3,4, the recordings were discontinued, since Chr spoke hardly any French. When he resumed speaking the language, the observations were continued. Subordinate clauses are new at this stage, appearing for the first time at age 3;3,21. The word order in German is as expected, with the verb in final position. No 'mistakes' are recorded for this child. (37)

gu mal was die hexe macht 'look what the witch does'

3;3,21

For other phenomena, the observations are the same as in Stage 2. 3.3.3. The special development of French. Stage II. Between 2;6,7 and 3;0,4, Chr speaks practically no French. The child often answers in German when spoken to in French, and when he speaks French, he only produces one constituent. Sometimes this is a single-constituent utterance, but for the most part it is a constituent within a mixed utterance. (38)

trink wasser un taureau 'drink water a bull' (a bull is drinking water)

2;6,7

(39)

paputt un crayon 'broken a pencil' (the pencil is broken)

(40)

hab en so en maison emacht 'have en like this en house made' (I've made a house like this)

2; 7,16

2;7,16

As we see in these examples, the French part of the utterance is always a nominal constituent. The predicate, an adjective in the second example and a VP in the others, is realized in German. The French predicates, which existed until then, have disappeared.

174

Two First Languages It is possible to interpret this imbalance in light of Radford's approach to early child

utterances. The structure of utterances at Stage I was explained by the lack of the C and I system. At this stage, these systems are now available in German, but not in French. The child's strategy is to use the functional categories COMP and INFL, which are now available in German, and lexical material in French, as long as the linguistic realization of functional categories in French is lacking. After this stage, Chr resumes speaking French, and after some temporary progress, he gives up the language again. The question now is what happens with the lexical and functional categories: to what extent are functional categories available in the further development of French and, when the child gives up the language again, do they disappear or are they retained? 3.3.4. Stage III In French. Now I will discuss the period between the ages 3;3,4 and 3;8,26. The recordings were continued after three months, when the child started speaking French again. What happened to his French during this time? Does he begin where he left off, with NP XP utterances? Chr is now in the multi-word stage in French. In the French part of the recordings, he produces purely French utterances. They clearly contain a verb, and for the most part have SVX structure (cf. Table 2) (41)

c'est c'est la rouge 'it's it's there red'

3;3,4

(42)

moi prend ga 'me take that' (I'll take this one)

3;3,4

Development in the structure of the utterance seems to go through phases similar to those of the corresponding stage in German (the beginning of the multi-word stage). Just as das ist X utterances, 'it's X', are frequent in German, c'est X 'it's X' are frequent in French (5 of 11 multi- constituent utterances). This kind of utterance is frequent in German at 2;8, in French at

3;3. This development is accompanied by the first appearance of the agent role in a purely French utterance (42). In Chr's German, agent also appeared at the beginning of the multi-word stage, at the same time as inflected verbs (age 2;6,7). Agent occurs here twice, both times in initial position. It is, however, difficult to decide whether word order has a special function in marking thematic roles since agent overlaps with subject. One month later at 3;4,11, various verbs appear with subject clitics. In utterances that allow analysis of word order, the subject occurs preverbally.

175

Parodi: Word Order and Case Morphology

Χ

ι

ι

ι

X

en en X

1

1

1

ι

ι

ι

ι

Ι

Ι

Ι

Ι

1

1

Sen

ι

ι

ι

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

ι

X

en

X X

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Ι

Ι

Ι

Ι

Ι

Ι

Ι

Ι

I

I

I

I

I

X

ft X

ft z ft Z

CN

1

1

1

1

00

ΓΟ

1

1

1

η

ι

ι

ι

ι

ft Z

X

ft x ft z

•-I

CM

ro

η

0)

σι

176

Two First Languages

(43)

je dors Ί sleep'

3;4,11

(44)

je mange un p to Ί eat a

3;4,11

Evidence for left and right dislocation with subject clitics appear at 3;6,18: (45)

qa c'est une bofte 'that it's a box'

Unlike German, XSV sequences are realized -correctly- in French: (46)

maintenant II va la borte ' now he goes the box'

3;6,18

Chr shows some uncertainties with the modal+infinitive sequence. Besides Mod-lnf-X (4 occurrences at the age 3;8,26), Mod-X-Inf occurs occasionally (one occurrence in the same recording). (47)

il veut rester avec les petits 'he wants to stay with the little ones'

3;8,26

(48)

il peut pas ici jouer ou nager ici 'he can not here play or swim here' (he can't play or swim here)

3;8,26

In the only subordinate clause which appears in this transcript, word order corresponds to that of standard French grammar (which differs from that of German): (49)

parcequetu/kup/pas(=ocoutes) 'because you listen not'

3;6,18

Thus Chr has also acquired the categories COMP and INFL in French during this period. The constituents assume the order prescribed by the structure of standard French, a development which can be predicted from Radford's hypothesis. The period investigated here goes on to the age of 3;8,26, when Chr's French begins to weaken again. We can observe that COMP and INFL are among the first victims of this deterioration, whereas lexical material is retained.

Parodi: Word Order and Case Morphology

177

3.4. Summary. Word order can be analyzed from the two-word stage onwards. Child utterances at this stage consist of an XP and an NP, the former being the predicate and the latter its argument. The data from the child Chr at the two-word stage are compatible with the hypothesis that the child produces utterances corresponding to the small clauses of adults. According to this hypothesis, the essential point is the lack of the functional categories COMP and INFL. Only lexical categories exist at this stage. The utterances in German and French show similar properties. In both languages, Chr prefers final position of the argument, while the child Iv prefers initial position. There are no significant differences between the two languages. For later stages only the child Chr has been analyzed. From the ages of 2;6 in German and 3;3 in French onwards, Chr has inflected verbs in both languages. The SVX sequence is preferred in both languages, but at the same time, distinctive language-specific sequences occur. These word sequences for the child under investigation are found at the beginning of the multi-word stage, in agreement with the findings of Meisel (1986). As soon as multi-word utterances occur (age 2;6), in German there are topicalized adverbs (but no topicalized objects), with the inflected verb remaining in the second position in the sentence. Incorrect V3 position is not found in German. In accordance with the standard grammar, in French the SV sequence is respected. Topicalization occurs in French at the age of 3;3,4, also at the beginning of the multi-word stage. Another distinctive sequence is the separation of finite and infinite verb constituents in German, as opposed to French. In German auxiliaries and modals are separated from infinitives from their first occurrence, while in French they stay together. In German subordinate clauses, Chr is no different from monolingual German children: verbs are in final position, as expected. The relationship between word order and certain thematic roles has also been investigated, to find out whether it is true that children prefer positional markings to morphological ones, and whether canonical sentence Schemas, such as the typical transitive sentence, are produced first (Slobin & Bever, 1982). For this child, transitive sentences are not observed at the beginning. In both German and French, agent occurs first when the multi-word stage begins, in German at the age of 2;6, and in French at 3;3. There is no evidence that a certain position either for agent or theme is somehow preferred. Thus, at the beginning of the multi-word stage, I register a preference for the SVX sequence on the one hand, and occurrences of language-specific sequences on the other. This points to the fact that the formation of the functional categories COMP and INFL and the resulting sequences play a role in this development. This framework is even better suited to explain the uneven development of French. In the weak stages of French, lexical categories continue to occur, but there is no occurrence of

178

Two First Languages

functional categories; indeed the latter do not appear until the age of 3;3. When Chr's French begins to weaken again at the age of 3;8, they seem to occur less and less frequently.

4. CASE MORPHOLOGY. 4.1. Background. Since German and French are so differently organized with respect to their morphosyntactic realization, one must first determine what is to be understood as case, before comparing the development of the two language systems. A distinction has to be made between Case as a phenomenon of government (abstract CASE) and case as a phenomenon of agreement (surface case, case morphology). The X-bar schema determines the type of phrasal category, but says nothing about the linear sequence of the constituents. Not every linear sequence is admissable; an NP must appear in a position where it can receive CASE. If it does not, the Case Filter is violated, and the structure is ruled out as ill-formed. The direction of Case assignment is language-specifically parametrized, and explains the different basic word order pattern in different languages. For example, CASE is assigned to the left in German, resulting in an SOV configuration; in French, an SVO language, it is assigned to the right. Hence, we are dealing with a phenomenon of government (cf. Chomsky, 1981; Chomsky, 1986). CASE within the VP can be assigned by the lexical categories V, P, A, and N; INFL assigns nominative Case to the subject. Overt case morphology, a phenomenon of agreement in the sense of Lapointe (1985), makes abstract CASE visible. In German, government relations are made visible by means of bound morphemes. In French, on the other hand, the explicit marking of government relations is expressed by clitic pronouns and by "syntactic" prepositions (ä, de). Bierwisch (1988) uses a feature system for the specification of case in German:

governed obi gen

Nom -

Ace + -

Dat + + -

Gen + + +

Minus is the default value, so that nominative is unmarked with respect to accusative, accusative is unmarked with respect to dative, dative unmarked with respect to genitive. This approach allows predictions about case assignment:

Parodi: Word Order and Case Morphology

179

- A Case assigner 'X* assigns the feature [+gov] to a complement NP (unless a lexical case is specified); - A Case assigner "X" assigns an NP [+obl] if the NP is a complement of P or the second complement of V (unless a lexical case is specified). Thus dative is the unmarked case for prepositional objects. A theory of acquisition has to explain how such a morphological system is acquired and which criteria are involved in the initial occurrences of morphology, i.e. is case introduced according to syntactic criteria, such as assigning the inflection n to the verb complement? Is there a relationship between case and thematic roles? Is a certain marking reserved for a certain thematic role? 4.2. Case Morphology in German. Acquisition by Monolinguals. Case inflection appears in German on nouns, articles, pronouns and adjectives. It overlaps with gender and number inflection. Inflected forms are only transparent for personal pronouns. The following shows the case paradigm of German: Number

Sg

PI

Gender

Masc

Fem

Neut

Nom Ace Oat Gen

der/ein den/einen dem/einem des/eines

die/eine die/eine der/einer der/einer

das/ein das/ein dem/einem des/eines

die die den der

Adjectives have different suffixes (strong/weak) according to the composition of the NP. Nouns are only rarely inflected; for example, the genitive -s for the masculine and neutral singular. Since there is only a small number of unambiguous suffixes, this system is not transparent for the child. Existing research on the acquisition of case morphology reports an initial phase in which there are only isolated occurrences of inflection, if at all. Determiners are mostly lacking, [n] and [de], a neutralized form, appear as precursors (Tracy, 1984; 1986; Mills, 1985; Clahsen, 1984; 1988c) (MLU up to < = 2.75). A stage follows in which determiners that are neutral with respect to case (in the form die or eine) are used and overgeneralized to contexts that would usually require another form. These neutral inflections frequently have the form of the nominative. Nominative forms of personal pronouns have also been observed (MLU Separable 27. Bodies of water a. Enclosed - > Open b. Tidewater c. Wet areas 28. Animal kingdom a. Most man like - > Insects, lower animals 29. Affect a. Extroversion - > Introversion

Example

Masculine Feminine Neuter

der Schnaps 'spirits' die Brause 'lemonade' das Pilsener 'pils beer'

Masculine Masculine Feminine Feminine Masculine Neuter

der Spatz 'sparrow' der Pilz 'mushroom' die Birke 'birch' die Birne 'pear' der Dill 'dill' das Heu 'hay'

Feminine Masculine

die Jacht 'yacht' der Kajak 'kayak'

Masculine - > Neuter

der Erdteil 'continent' das Abteil 'compartment'

Masculine - > Feminine Neuter Feminine

der See 'lake' die See 'sea' das Fleet 'tidal canal' die Pfütze 'puddle'

Masculine - >

der Affe 'ape'

Feminine

die Fliege 'fly'

Masculine Feminine

der Ärger 'annoyance' die Angst 'anxiety'

1.2.2. Morphological gender rules in French and German. Morphological rules partly predict the gender of nouns with respect to composition, affixation, and zero-derivation. In German, the gender of morphologically complex nouns (compounds) is determined by their last member (last-member rule, cf. Kopeke & Zubin, 1984) which almost always represents the head (cf. Plank, 1985:254). This is not true for French: here, the head determining the gender of the noun also frequently occurs in initial position, e.g. un chou-fleur (=a cabbage (m) -flower (f)) 'cauliflower'. As shown in Tables 2c and 2d9, the gender of complex nouns in German and French is predictable on the basis of quite a large number of affixes. In German, there are also affixes which are not associated with only one particular gender, for example, the affixes -turn and -nis. Following Kopeke & Zubin (1984), in German zero-derivation is associated with the

202

Two First Languages

Table 2c: French affixes and their associated gender1 Affixes

Associated Gender

Example

Suffixes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

- age - ade - aille -eile - aine -ail - ance - eau - ier - esse -ette - eur - ment

Masculine Feminine Feminine Feminine Feminine Masuline Feminine Masculine Masculine Feminine Feminine Masculine Masculine

- ise - son

Feminine Feminine Masculine Feminine

-on - ion

le pay sage 'landscape' la promenade 'walk' la ferraille 'scrap' la tourelle 'turret' la trentaine 'about thirty' le portail 'portal' une esperance 'hope' le tableau 'painting' un encrier 'inkwell' la politesse 'politeness' la chaussette 'sock' lebonheur 'luck' un appartement 'apartment' lasottise 'stupidity' la chanson 'song' le coupon 'coupon' la decoration ' decoration'

assignment of a particular gender, namely neuter gender, e.g. das Laufen 'running (n)'. This is not the case in French. Concerning German monosyllabic nouns, Kopeke (1982) presents five morphological rules which enable the language user to infer the gender of a noun from the plural allomorph it takes. In French, gender cannot be predicted on the basis of plural allomorphs because the plural is audible only with a small number of nouns. 1.2.3. Phonological gender rules in French and German. The gender of monosyllabic and polysyllabic nouns is partly predictable on the basis of their phonological characteristics. The different phonological rules are set out in Tables 2e and 2f. Kopeke (1982) formulates gender rules on the basis of the structure of German monosyllabic nouns. Gender is predictable from two structural properties of nouns: the vowel classes (long or short vowels or diphthongs) and the number of consonants in initial position, i.e. those preceding the vowel, or in final position, i.e. those following the vowel. The phonetic realization of the different positions is of no importance for the assignment of gender. According to Kopeke (1982:107), the majority of rules taking into account the structure of nouns tends to exclude feminine gender. Both in French and German, one can observe an association of nominal endings with particular genders.11 Frequently, a more reliable prediction concerning the gender

203

Müller: Gender Table 2d: German affixes and their associated gender 12 Affixes

(I)

1. 2. 3.

(II) 4.

Associated Gender Prefixes be-

ge-

ver-

Suffixes - er - ei - heit

Masculine Neuter Masculine

der Bereich 'domain' des Gesicht 'face' der Verband 'bandage' der Hörer 'hearer' die Polizei 'police' die Krankheit 'disease' die Autorin 'authoress' die Heiterkeit 'cheerfulness' der Sperling 'sparrow' die Erbschaft 'heritage' der Enterich 'drake' die Zeichnung 'drawing' das Türmchen 'turret' das Tischlein 'little table' der Irrtum 'error' das Wachstum 'growth' die Wildnis 'wilderness' das Ergebnis 'result' die Pubertät 'puberty'

7. 8.

-in - keit

Masculine Feminine Feminine Feminine Feminine

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

-

Masculine Feminine Masculine Feminine Neuter Neuter

15.

-turn

Masculine/Neuter

16.

- nis

Feminine/Neuter

17.

-tat

Feminine

5. 6.

ling schaft rich ung chen lein

Example

of a noun can be made on the basis of a cluster of final sounds. Clusters of sounds may not only be associated, but also disassociated with a particular gender. With respect to neuter gender, Ivanova (1985:69) observes that it is mostly characterized

'negatively', i.e. that clear

disassociations but no clear associations with particular endings may be observed. Kopeke (1982) shows that in German, the gender of monosyllabic nouns is also predictable on the basis of the kind of their medial sounds. He observes that nouns with a long vowel in medial position are associated with masculine or neuter gender. In addition to this, Kopeke (1982) presents seven gender rules which are sensitive to the initial sounds of monosyllabic nouns in German. Tucker et al. (1968, 1977) show that in French, initial sounds only serve to predict the gender of nouns unless this is possible on the basis of final sounds. Finally, Kopeke (1982) claims that the gender of monosyllabic nouns is also predictable on the basis of relations between their final and medial sounds, their initial and medial sounds, and their initial and final sounds. He calls these rules 'stand-by rules". Stand-by rules are quite complex and provide only additional information to the phonological rules already mentioned above.

204

Two First Languages

Table 2e: Phonological gender rules in French Phonolog. Form

Associated Gender14 No. of Nouns15

Final sounds: 1. [b] 2. [k] 3. PI 4. [f] 5. 6. (I) 7. 8. [m] 9. [n] 10. [r] 11. [s] 12. [/] 13. M 14. [z] 15. H 16. [a] 17. [wa] 18. ® 19. ß 20. [i] 21. [o] 22. l»l 23. [oe] 24. [y] 25. tu] 26. [] 27.

M(168) ca.65% M(555) ca.67% F(442) ca.62% M(268) ca.89% M(172) ca.73% F(238) ca.68% M(924) ca.58% M(1292)ca.92% F(819) ca.68% M(3974) ca.78% F(848) ca.61% F(191) ca.66% F(98) ca.69% F(551) ca.90% M(1368) ca.94% M(648) ca.82% M(153) ca.85% M(1949)ca.99% M(929) ca.99% F(1762)ca.75% M(841) ca.97% M(184) ca.97% M(17) 100% M(144) ca.72% M(150) ca.88% M(564) ca.90% F(1872)ca.70%

[g] [i]

ra

258 833 714 301 235

352 1581

1406 1204 5080 1379 290 143 612 1453 791 179 1963 938 2337 865 189 17 201 171

625 2666

Exception16

lajambe(90) 'leg' la perruque(278)'wig' lesud(272) 'south' la soif(33) 'thirst' la bague(63) 'ring' lesoleil(114) 'sun' la colle(657) 'glue' laplume(114) 'feather' le clown(385) 'clown' la montre(1 1 06) 'watch' lesens(531) 'sense' le dimanche(99) 'Sunday' lefleuve(45) 'river' le vase (61) 'vase' la plage(85) 'beach' la tombola(143) 'tombola' anoix(26) 'nut' ladent(14) 'tooth' lafaim(9) 'hunger' letapis(575) 'carpet' la photo(24) 'photo' laqueue(S) 'tail' lavue(57) laroue(21) labaie(61) le mouton(794)

'sight' 'wheel' 'bay' 'sheep'

Nouns with the final sounds [e], [t] and [p] are equally distributed across the two genders.

205

M ller: Gender

Table 2f: Phonological gender rules in German 17 Phonolog. Form (1) 1 Ε.

Structure: Χ diphthong F1

(II) 2E.

Final sounds: X{[s][/]}[t]

3E.

X{[f] [p] [x]}[t]

Associated Gender

No. of Nouns

M/N(123) ca.92%

134

dieZeit(11) 'time'

M/F(66) ca.94% F(36)

70

das Nest(4) 'nest'

55

derSaft(12) 'juice' das Heft(7) 'book' die Hand(32) 'hand' das Bein(42) 'leg' dieZahl(S) 'number' dieMilch(11) 'milk' dasGeld(18) 'money' die Mark(8) 'mark' dasHerz(14) 'heart' die Gans(1 8) 'goose' das Salz(22) 'salt' die Couch(6) 'couch' das Fleisch(S) 'flesh' die Gier(5) 'greed' derStier(13) 'bull' der Schwur(7) Oath' das Azur(3) 'azure' der Hase18 'rabbit' das Auge 'eyedas Laufen 'running'

ca.66% 4E.

X nasal (C)(C)

M (21 6)

290

ca.75% 5E.

X [I]

M/N(74)

79

ca.94% 6E.

X [I] C

M (60)

89

ca.68% 7E.

X [r] Stop (C)

M(43)

65

ca.66% 8E.

X C [s]

M (120)

160

ca.75% QC

Υ ΓΠ

UJ

M(45)

56

ca.80% 10.

[i:r]

N(27)

45

ca.60% 11.

{[u:] [y:]} [r]

F(131)

141

ca.93% 12.

[e]

13.

[en]

Exception

ca.90%F(1350)

M19

15000

206

Two First Languages Table 2f continued

Phonolog. Form

14. (Ill) 15E.

Associated Gender

m Medial sounds: XV+longY

(IV) Initial sounds: 16E. [kn]

N(55)

No. of Nouns

58

95% M/N(317) ca.86%

369

die Uhr(52) 'watch'

M(14)

15

M(47)

53

dasKnie(1) 'knee' die Drei(6) 'three' dieStirn(11) 'forehead' dasStuck(12) 'piece' dieDult(1) 'tolerance' die Rast(4) 'rest' die Tur(4) 'door' die Kraft(4) 'strength'

ca.93% 17E. 18E.

{[tr][dr]}Y

me Y

ca.89% M(144)

167

ca.86%

19E.

[d]Y

20E. 21 E.

MY MY

22E.

{[gr][kr]}Y

(V) Stand-by rules: 23E. XV+ long + high [r]

M/N(34) ca.97% M/N(60) ca.94% M/N(45) ca.92% M/N(50) ca.93%

35

F(17)

25

64

49 54

ca.68% 24E.

XV-longStopC

Exception

M(106) ca.86%

124

der Flur(5) 'hall' das Bier(3) 'beer' die Box(9) 'box' das Netz(9) 'net'

1.2.4. Implications for the acquisition process. The different gender rules vary with regard to the number of nouns to which they apply (frequency). One may assume that rules with a greater scope are acquired early. Unfortunately, no calculations are as yet available for semantic and morphological rules. The number and the kind of exceptions to the rules may also have some influence on their acquisition. The number of exceptions has not yet been calculated for semantic and morphological rules. The kind of exceptions which occur can be determined for every rule type. According to Mills (1986a), the natural gender rule is a clear rule in the sense that there exists only a small number of exceptions and that these exceptions cannot be found in the core (and system) of the lexicon (cf. Kopeke & Zubin, 1983). The same may be true for the animacy

Müller: Gender

207

and personal rule. Note that it seems plausible to assume that the acquisition of semantic rules depends on the child's cognitive development (cognitive pace-setting). According to Slobin's (1973) operating principle A: 'Pay attention to the end of words', final sounds are the most salient. One may hypothesize that gender rules concerning final sounds and suffixes will be acquired before other phonological and morphological rules. The acquisition of the last-member rule presupposes the child's knowledge of the gender of the compound's members. Concerning plural morphology, Mills (1986a) hypothesizes that it is acquired concurrently or after gender. Thus, it seems implausible to assume that during early developmental phases, the knowledge of the plural form of a noun will help the child to determine its gender.

1.3. A possible hierarchy of gender rules. On the basis of a computer program assigning gender to monosyllabic nouns in German, Kopeke (1982:111) suggests the following hierarchy of gender rules: 1. semantic rules 2. morphological rules 3. phonological rules a. related to final sounds b. related to initial sounds For the acquisition of gender rules it seems plausible to argue that semantic rules, which are higher on the hierarchy and thus have a greater scope than the other rule types, will be acquired early. However, Mills (1986a:35) assumes that factors such as input which cannot so easily be related to a hierarchical ordering can be relevant in acquisition'. The child has to learn the dominance of one rule over another. The dominance relation need not necessarily be learned simultaneously with the rules themselves. Thus, the child may, for example, associate the German diminutive -chen with neuter gender and the feature [-male] with feminine gender but may not know which rule dominates in the case of Mädchen ' girl (n)' being within the scope of both rules.

2. THE ACQUISITION OF GENDER IN CHILDREN.

When analyzing the acquisition of gender in monolingual children, researchers have investigated whether the child makes gender assignments on the basis of rules or memorizes the gender of each noun and - if the child's gender assignments are indeed determined by rules - whether semantic or formal rules are acquired first.

208

Two First Languages

2.1. The acquisition of paradigms.

Following Slobin (1973,1985a), one dimension of a paradigm may be hypothesized early and the paradigm may be learned quite rapidly by the child if grammatical regularities can be mapped onto relational concepts or "grammaticizable Notions". This conception is referred to as the 'semantic primacy hypothesis'. Following semantic primacy, the child first pays attention to the semantic properties of nouns, i.e. semantic gender rules should be acquired before formal rules (cf. 1.3.). With regard to gender, for example, natural gender represents one of Slobin's •grammaticizable Notions'. The child should combine nonreferential units with nouns on the basis of the nouns' semantic features [+/- male]. One could call such a procedure 'semantic learning". If the child does not find semantic features relevant for the choice of nonreferential units, s/he proceeds to the next step: s/he will try to analyze and use the functors according to the formal, i.e. phonological and morphological, properties of the referential units. One could call such a procedure form-related learning'. If the child even does not find phonological clues as to the choice of functors, s/he will proceed to the next step: s/he will try to differentiate the functors on the basis of elements that systematically cooccur with the citation forms, and set up a paradigm in which choice of functor is conditioned by factors that regularly cooccur with the citation form" (Slobin, 1985a:42). This procedure might be called 'distributional learning". One would expect that, quite early in the acquisition process, the child will be able to set up distributional patterns. As for distributional learning, the strategy of rote-learning - i.e. the memorization of functor-noun combinations is of great importance. One could predict that the child should not have greater difficulty with •irregular gender" than with 'regular gender". If the child fails to acquire a paradigm on the basis of the strategies mentioned above, s/he chooses a default solution, using the most salient and/or applicable of the different functors in all contexts. In the literature, this is referred to as "inflectional imperialism". 2.1.1. Semantic learning. In her longitudinal study of German children, Mills (1986a, 1986b) finds evidence against the semantic primacy hypothesis. She observes that semantic and formal gender rules are acquired simultaneously. The natural gender rule and the phonological rule according to which feminine gender is assigned to nouns ending in [e] are both acquired before the age of 3. 2.1.2. Form-related learning. Karmiloff-Smith (1978, 1979) finds evidence in favor of the assumption that formal gender rules are acquired before semantic gender rules by French

Müller: Gender

209

children. She analyzed gender assignments to nonsense nouns made by 3-12 year-old children in a cross-sectional study. She makes the following observations: - as early as 3 years, children make gender assignments on the basis of formal rules, disregarding semantic and distributional properties of nouns. This is true for the gender marking on the article and the adjective. Local lexical agreement is acquired before non-local agreement, i.e. agreement exceeding the limits of a single S.20 Even with 3-4 year-old children, one can observe that the choice of pronouns depends on semantic properties of nouns: fewer errors occur if pronouns refer to male or female referents. - with increasing age, children take into consideration the semantic and distributional properties of nouns. If no reliable predictions concerning the gender marking can be made on the basis of the noun's suffix, children as young as 4 years are able to make use of semantic and distributional cues. Böhme (1983) tested the comprehension of gender-marked possessive pronouns in 3-6 year-old German children. She observes that children make fewer errors with pronouns which refer to nouns with grammatical gender than with those which refer to nouns with natural gender. One has to bear in mind, however, that only comprehension and one category were tested. Clark (1985), reviewing cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of Romance makes the observation that gender is acquired by about the age of 3 in French. Berman (1981) and Levy (1983a, 1983b) also observe that Hebrew children have acquired gender at the age of 3. Their results are based on a longitudinal study of one child and a crosssectional study. Moreover, Levy (1983a) finds out that Hebrew children first pay attention to formal features of nouns when making gender assignments. She attributes the early acquisition of formal gender rules to the great reliability of formal rules in Hebrew and to the 'surface rhyming phenomenon' which occurs with the masculine and feminine inflection (cf. also in German ein-e groB-eTass-e'abiacupff)'). 2.1.3. Distributional learning. Maratsos & Chalkley (1980) assume that children acquire gender by means of distributional patterns. According to distributional learning, it should not make any difference whether the child acquires a gender system with semantic rules only, such as English, or a system with semantic and formal rules, such as German. Mills (1986b) observes that English children acquire the natural gender rule much later than German children. She assumes that this is due to the reduced 'contact* of English children with gender: in English, gender is marked only on pronouns. MacWhinney (1978), who tested the ability to make gender assignments to real and nonsense nouns in 3-12 year-old German children, finds out that children make fewer errors if the investigator's utterance already contains a gender-marked functor. He concludes that the acquisition of gender is determined mainly by distributional learning. Mills (1986b) calls

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Two First Languages

MacWhinney's results into question: among other things, MacWhinney chose nonsense nouns which had an association with a particular gender on the basis of phonetic form. 2.1.4. Inflectional imperialism. In a longitudinal study, Pupier (1982a) observes that bilingual (French/English) children first overgeneralize the masculine forms of the articles. Mills (1986a) observes that in German children first overgeneralize the feminine definite article and functors ending in -e. In Taeschner's (1983) longitudinal study, however, bilingual (German/Italian) children are shown to prefer the masculine/neuter form ein. 3. THE ACQUISITION OF GENDER IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN.

In this part, I will present the results of my own research (cf. also Müller, 1987). I analyzed the acquisition of gender in one bilingual (French/German) child named Caroline from the age 1 ;6,03 up to 5;00,06. Every recording of Caroline's speech has been studied. Although the analysis of a second child named Ivar has not yet been completed, I will nevertheless present some results of the second study in the footnotes. 3.1. The developmental phases. The acquisition of gender may be divided into 5 phases for French, and 6 phases for German. The division into phases is based mainly on a qualitative analysis of the data.21 In the quantitative analysis, only types were considered. 3.1.1. Phase A. During this phase, which lasts approximately up to 1;08 (MLU22 Fr. and Ger.: under 2) in Caroline's development, forms carrying a gender marking in the adult languages do not appear. In both languages, the child expands the noun phrase, which has so far been represented by N or other bare lexical categories, to the sequence "(X) N". It is worth noting that the majority of nouns still appear without any X-element. Thus, X-elements are not obligatory. The X-element is represented by "proforms" or presyntactic forms, such as [a], [de], [e]. Preforms are not yet marked for gender; the choice of a proform seems to be neither phonologically nor semantically conditioned. 3.1.2. Phase B. In Caroline's development, this phase lasts from 1;09,16 until 2 years (MLU Fr.: approximately 2 Ger.: under 2).^4 This period sees the emergence of some adult-like functors, such as the indefinite article. However, the majority of noun phrases still lack function words. In French, the child already seems to have established an agreement relation between the indefinite

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article and the noun. Another characteristic of this phase is that the child appears to use the noun in combination with only one adult-like functor or modifier. 3.1.2.1. French. At 1 ;08,06, there is already spontaneous usage of two nouns in combination with forms that carry a gender marking in the adult system, namely lelait 'the milk (m)' and *un photo 'a photo (f)'. Both determiners belong to the adult masculine gender paradigm and are characterized by their relatively high frequency (cf. 1.1.2.). During the transition to phase B, Caroline uses the masculine and feminine form of the indefinite French article.25 Usage of the feminine indefinite article une always corresponds to that found in the target language. This is not, however, the case with the masculine form un. The use of this latter form seems to depend on formal properties of the nouns. Some of the nouns which are combined with un contain a vowel characterized by the feature [-high] in their last syllable, namely, for example, un ballon 'a balloon (m)', u n mouton 'a sheep (m)', *un maison 'a house (f)', *un aita (=guitare) 'a guitar (f)', un dao (unclear reference). One may speak of the first gender rule. The observation that final sounds are concerned indicates that saliency seems to be important here. Unfortunately, there are no examples of the possible application of the natural gender rule. The form [la] does not yet seem to be used as a determiner by Caroline during this phase.

Ofi D

Among other things, the form has a deictic function. Berkele (1983) hypothesizes that the reason for the form [la] not being used as a determiner may be due to its homophony with the adverb ja 'there'. With regard to the assumption that children first seem to follow the principle of unifunctionality, one may conclude that the form [la], already being occupied with the deictic function, will only later be used by the child to express more than one function (but cf. footnote 30). Because of the apparent absence of the determiner ja, it is impossible to know whether the masculine definite article, which Caroline already uses quite often during phase B, is already being employed in the gender-indicating function. Usage of the masculine definite article always corresponds to that found in the target language during this phase. Other function words, such as the possessive mon and the pronouns H and eile, occur only sporadically. As yet, nothing conclusive can be said about the gender marking. During this phase, adjectives appear either in the masculine or in the feminine form, and do not yet appear to agree with the gender of the noun. Another important characteristic of this phase is that only one functor is combined with one noun: Caroline does not yet seem to know that, for example, the forms un and je may appear with the same noun. Such knowledge represents, among other things, one of the prerequisites for the acquisition of gender paradigms.

212

Two First Languages

3.1.2.2. German. In German, there are only a few examples of the use of function words in Caroline's speech during phase B. She uses both forms of the indefinite article, but it is only the use of the form eine which deviates from that of the target language. The preference for this form may be explained by the high frequency of the ending -e in prenominal position in the adult system. This form is also salient through its polysyllabicity.27 Due to the limited data, nothing conclusive can be said about the gender-indicating function of the indefinite article. Caroline does not yet use the definite articles.28 During this phase, the pronouns das and die occur. The use of the pronoun das for deictic reference is interesting in that, although this pronoun is used regardless of the gender and number of the nouns referred to, Caroline does not appear to employ it if the referent is a person or a toy which could be characterized as being human. This would indicate that the child has already begun to distinguish between the features [+human] and [-human]. This distinction is a prerequisite for the acquisition of the animacy and personal rule. Since the possessive is used only once in German, nothing can as yet be said concerning the gender marking. In German, too, nouns are combined with only one functor. 3.1.2.3 Summary: phase B. During phase B, the first adult-like functors appear in both languages; at least in French, one can speak of the emergence of the functional category D. In French, the indefinite article seems to be used, among other things, in the gender-indicating function. In view of the limited data and the absence of the feminine definite article in French, nothing conclusive can as yet be said concerning the use of other functors in this function. French adjectives do not yet seem to agree with the gender of the nouns. Although the corpus of French data does not contain any examples of the possible application of semantic gender rules, the fact that first gender rules also seem to be related to the phonological form of the corresponding nouns represents evidence against the semantic primacy hypothesis. 3.1.3. Phase C. In both languages, this phase lasts from 2;00,09 up to 2;06,22 (MLU Fr.: approximately 2,6 Ger.: approximately 2,1). Important characteristics of this phase are that the single noun cooccurs with more than only one function word, e.g. le mouton 'the sheep (m)' at 2;02,23 and un mouton 'a sheep (m)' at 2;02,23 and that, according to Berkele (1983), from 2;04,08 onwards 'zero-marked" noun phrases - i.e. those noun phrases where the child omits obligatory functors - almost disappear. During this phase, Caroline uses almost all functors of the adult systems and seems to acquire gender rules in both languages. 3.1.3.1. German. According to Berkele (1983), definite noun phrases dominate throughout this phase. Very frequently, the child uses the masculine or feminine definite article with neuter nouns

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(up to 2;01,26 both articles with a single neuter noun):29 no neuter noun is consistently combined with the neuter definite article. There are only 3 instances of the uses of the form [das] as a determiner, namely with the nouns Haus 'house (n)' and Schiff 'boat (n)'. At 2;04,20, Caroline imitates the sequence das schiff 'the boat (n)' and combines it with the feminine definite article: die das schiff. The child seems to be unsure as to whether the form das can be used as a determiner. Also, "zero-marking' is used as a way of avoiding the neuter definite article. Berkele (1983) hypothesizes that - as has already been observed for the form [la] - the neuter definite article is avoided because of its homophony with the demonstrative pronoun das. The form [das] has a deictic function and, following the principle of unifunctionality, the child will be able to use this form in other functions only at a later stage.30 Such an avoidance of the neuter definite article can also be observed in Clahsen's (1982a) data from monolingual German children. It is interesting to note that from the age of 2;01,26 onwards, the variation die - der (e.g. die auto 'the car (n)' - der auto) no longer appears with neuter nouns. Each neuter noun is combined either with the article die (70%) or der (30%).31 This indicates that a classification of nouns is taking place. Unfortunately, it remains unclear as to what exactly determines the choice of a particular form of the definite article. Caroline uses the form [das] as a demonstrative pronoun regardless of the gender and the number of the nouns referred to. However, she uses the demonstrative to refer to nouns with the feature [-human]. Here, the child would appear to have acquired the animacy and personal rule. As has already been assumed in section 1.2.4., the animacy and personal rule is fairly clearcut, which may explain its early acquisition. Almost no errors occur with nominative determining elements. Correct assignments almost always reach 80%. With the adjectival possessive, no errors occur. This observation may support the assumption that a classification of nouns takes place. The masculine and feminine definite articles represent an exception to the '80% criterion', as these forms are often used incorrectly with neuter nouns. However, the masculine definite article der is never overgeneralized to feminine nouns^ and most overgeneralizations of the feminine article die may be explained by the application of gender rules or by the observation that Caroline apparently uses this form probably the accusative die - in free variation with the accusative masculine definite article den in the presence of the same noun. The indefinite keine is used only once (incorrectly), namely with the masculine noun Platz 'place'. The demonstrative is also used less frequently. The feminine form diese, however, is always used correctly with nouns ending in [e]. During phase C, Caroline seems to have acquired the natural gender rule; she makes correct use of masculine and feminine function words with nouns such as Mama 'mommy (f)', Oma 'grandma (f)', Caroline. Papa 'daddy (m)', and Opa 'grandpa (m)'. Up to 2;03,11, however, the natural gender rule seems to compete with the phonological rule, according to which nouns

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Two First Languages

ending in -a receive the feminine definite article (cf. also at 4;02,16 *die sofa 'the sofa (n)'). This phonological rule formulated by the child does not exist in the adult system:33 (1)

*dieopa 'the grandpa (m)'

2;01,26

(2)

der opa 'the grandpa (m)'

2;06,22

(3)

der papa 'the daddy (m)'

2;03,11

(4)

»diepapa 'thedaddy (m)'

2;03,11

(5)

der papa 'the daddy (m)'

2;03,23

The absence of assignments of the form der to nouns denoting female persons and to nouns ending in -a in the data can be interpreted as further evidence in favor of both rules. Mills (1986a) also observes that the natural gender rule and the phonological rule 1234 are acquired simultaneously, before the age of 3.35 Thus, the semantic primacy hypothesis would not seem to be confirmed.36 Universals - such as the saliency of rules concerning the ending of nouns - and language-specific factors - such as the notion of "clear rule' - seem to determine the acquisition of gender rules. Variations such as der papa - *die papa 'the daddy (m)' may also indicate that the child does not yet know that with nouns such as papa, the semantic rule dominates the phonological rule. As has been suggested in 1.3., the dominance relation need not necessarily be learned simultaneously with the gender rules themselves. Caroline also acquires the phonological rule 12 according to which she employs feminine function words with nouns ending in [e]. The surface rhyming phenomenon (cf. Levy, 1983a) may have helped the child to recognize this phonological rule, e.g. eine flasche 'a bottle If)', meine flasche 'my bottle'. Evidence in favor of the existence of this rule represents the observation that the feminine determiner die is also used with French nouns to which Caroline attaches the ending [e]: 2;01,13 die portfe) (=porte) 'the door (f)' and 2;03,11 die conenfel (=coccinelle) 'the ladybug(f)'.37 Of the remaining uses of the feminine definite article, 61 % correspond to those of the target language. It is important to note that target-deviant usage seems to be restricted to contexts requiring functors expressing accusative and dative case38 - which might be defined by the child differently from the adult system - i.e. the form die is used regardless of the gender of the noun in these contexts. Perhaps, the child marks [-nominative] case but by one form only, namely the frequent form die39, thus ignoring gender:40

Müller: Gender

215

(6)

der nom geht nich der der (=der bonhomme (male doll) geht nicht der der) 'the bonhomme (m) does not go'

2;05,18

(7)

ich wi die nom kaufen (=ich will die bonhomme kaufen) want to buy the bonhomme (m)'

2;06,08

Among other things, postverbal contexts seem to be perceived by the child as contexts that require functors expressing [-nominative] case (cf. wo is den elefant 'where is the elefant (m)' at 3;03,10). This may explain the following erroneous assignments: (8)

*wo's die bäbär (=wo ist der Bär) 'where is the bear (m)'

2;05,04

(9)

*wo's die andere (-wo ist die andere) 'where is the other (one) (bear (m))'

2;05,04

(10)

*wo die fisch 'where (is) the fish (m)'

2;06,06

The masculine accusative form den begins to be used quite frequently at about 2;06,22. It is then used in free variation with the form die. With pronouns, errors amount at least to approximately 45% for each type of pronoun. The use of the possessive is an extreme example: all errors consist of its nominal use. The child shows a preference for the feminine form meine. The demonstrative and personal pronouns are used only rarely. Nothing conclusive can as yet be said about gender marking in view of the limited data. With the demonstrative pronouns der and die, erroneous assignments constitute 44% of all usage. It is interesting to note that most erroneous gender markings with pronouns occur when referring to masculine and neuter nouns, in contexts not requiring a nominative functor, and with non-local agreement (exceeding the limits of a single S), i.e., for example, never in dislocated constructions.41 One explanation for the latter observation could be that agreement within a single S is easier to establish than agreement which exceeds these limits (local cues).

It is also

apparent that during phase C, pronouns are already used on the basis of phonological and semantic (cf. also the use of the pronoun das) characteristics of the nouns they replace, which contradicts Karmiloff-Smith's (1978, 1979) and Bohme's (1983) assumptions (cf. 2.1.2.) that children first consider only one of these characteristics when marking gender on pronouns. During phase C, the data include only nominalized "adjectives*. Quite often, the gender marking already corresponds to the target language. However, many examples come from one recording at 2;04,20, where Caroline often takes over "Det + Adj" sequences from the adult's

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Two First Languages

utterances. Errors can be characterized by either the absence of any inflection (*ein gelb 'a yellow (one)', *der groß 'the big (one)')43 or by the overgeneralization of the -e ending (*ein gelbe 'a yellow (one)'). The child does not yet seem to know that there are different declensions of the adjective. One might assume that the child, having apparently recognized that there exists an agreement relation between function words and nouns on the syntagmatic level, also recognizes that there is also a paradigmatic relation between the diverse functors. However, one may observe that during phase C, distributional patterns do not seem to emerge with various syntactic categories. The child establishes a syntagmatic relation between functors and nouns. An awareness that gender marked forms are related in gender paradigms cannot yet be observed: (11)

die hand meine (= Hand) 'the hand (f)" mine'

2;03,11

(12)

der meine (=bonhomme, male doll) 'this (one)' 'mine'

2;04,08

(13)

sie die (=Maus, mouse (f)) 'she"this(one)'

2;03,11

(14)

er (=Clopinette, female cat) die clopinette 'he' 'the clopinette'

2;05,04

(15)

ein gelb der grüne (=Bauklotz, block (m)) 'ayellow (one)' 'the green (one)'

2;04,20

(16)

eintonne die tonne 'a barrel (f)' 'the barrel'

2;05,18

3.1.3.2. French. In French, definite noun phrases dominate during this phase, too (cf. Berkele, 1983). From 2;00,09 up to 2;01,26, one can observe that Caroline avoids the form [la] in the function of a determiner. She replaces it by the adult plural form [le] (=les). Exactly what determines the choice of this form remains unclear.44 Although the form [la] is sometimes used preceding nouns, the child does not yet seem to perceive it as a separate category: (17)

A: tu l'entends la poule 'can you hear the hen?' C: la poule.une (l)a poule 'thehen.athehen'

2;00,09?

At 2;02,09, the child starts to use the form [la] as a determiner (cf. Berkele, 1983). From this point onwards, there is evidence in favor of the assumption that Caroline assigns the definite articles to nouns on the basis of phonological properties.

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217

With the exception of adjectival possessives (after 2;00,09 (=1 error) no errors occur with these forms), various target-deviant uses can be observed with determining elements.45 However, the majority of these errors may be said to be due to the application of gender rules. Erroneous assignments made with the definite articles amount to 17%. Here, however, it is important to note that the feminine definite article is never overgeneralized to masculine nouns. With only a small number of nouns, the variation le - ja occurs, i.e. for the first time, the child uses nouns with both the masculine and the feminine definite article. The gender of these nouns is not predictable on the basis of gender rules in the adult system; they are exceptions to existing gender rules, e.g. chaussure 'shoe (f)', robe 'dress (f)', iambe 'leg (f)'. The child has to memorize the gender of these nouns. The fact that the child is unsure about the gender of these nouns is emphasized by the observation that the variation je - la with a single noun almost always occurs within the same recording. The observation that Caroline has more problems with •irregular* gender than with 'regular* gender may be interpreted as evidence in favor of rulelearning. Gender rules46 concern the final sounds of nouns: the ending [e] and nasal endings seem to be associated with masculine determining elements. Again, the surface rhyming phenomenon (cf. Levy, 1983a) may have helped the child to recognize this latter phonological rule, e.g. mon lapln 'my rabbit (m)', un lapln 'a rabbit'. The application of both rules also leads to erroneous assignments such as, for example, at 2;05,04 *le poupee 'the doll (f)'and at 2;03,11 *le maison 'the house (f)'. Again, both rules are salient - they concern the final sounds of nouns - and clear: nasal endings are associated with masculine gender in French (cf. Table 2e). In Caroline's lexicon, the majority of nouns ending in [e] has masculine gender. The forms du and ay are always used correctly. The utterance les couche de le bäbar (=la couche du bäbär) 'the bear's diapers' at 2;00,09 may indicate that the child analyzes du as de

±Je. With the forms of the indefinite article erroneous assignments constitute 36% of all usage. 64% of all errors concern the use of the masculine article. Some errors made with the masculine article un are perhaps due to the presence of a third category within the noun phrase, namely the adjective, i.e. "Del + Adj + NV 2;03,11 *un petit auto 'a little car (f)' 2;04,08 *un petit boule 'a little ball (f)'. In this case, there would be no agreement relation between the determiner and the gender of the noun. The assignment of the form un would have been conditioned merely by the syntactic constellation 'Det + Adj + N". However, both nouns represent exceptions to adult phonological rules according to which masculine gender is assigned (cf. also *un poule 'a hen (f)'). Caroline also tends to prefer the masculine indefinite article when her intention is to focus on the numeral function; the gender marking then seems to be neutralized:

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Two First Languages

(18)

A: c'est ει la poupee? (puts a shoe on the floor) 'this belongs to the doll (f)?' C: oh non Oh no' A: comme ga? hohoho (puts the foot of a doll into the shoe) 'like this? hohoho' C: encore un (goes to the door and fetches one shoe) 'another one'

2;04,08

A: ga fait un peu grand ces chaussures quand—meme pour les poupees/ une chaussure pas eh.pour chacun? 'however these shoes are a bit big for the dolls/ one shoe not eh for each' C: un chaussure pou pou bonhomme (takes "bonhomme", male doll and puts one foot into one shoe) One shoe for for bonhomme' As regards pronominal forms, one can observe that only the clitic object pronouns je and ja and the personal pronouns ij and eile are used. The pronoun je often cannot be distinguished from a I'est 's/he/it is'. The pronoun occurs only 4 times in the data with reference to a sheep (m) and a mouse (f) (as an indefinite pronoun at 2;06,08). Therefore, nothing conclusive can be said about the gender marking. This is also true for the feminine pronoun la. The use of the personal pronouns ij and eile corresponds in 74% to the target language. Errors mainly tend to occur if the agreement relation exceeds the limits of a single S. In view of the fact that dislocated structures are very frequent in Caroline's French, the higher number of correct assignments - in comparison to German - is not surprising. Most correct assignments involve nouns ending in a nasal. Pronouns already appear to be used correctly to refer to nouns with natural gender, a phenomenon which has also been observed for German. There are only a few examples in the data. The personal pronoun jui is used once at 2;03,11 to refer to a bear (m). With the adjective, errors occur only when the indefinite article is present. In view of the fact that feminine forms exclusively occur in imitations of the adult utterance or in formulas such as allez petite fille 'come on little girl (f)', it is difficult to draw any conclusions concerning the gender marking. In *un petit auto 'a little car (f)' and *un petit boule 'a little ball', the adjective might also be said to agree with the indefinite article, i.e. with the D-element (but cf. the discussion concerning the usage of the indefinite article). The following examples show - as has already been observed in German - that distributional patterns do not tend to appear in French during phase C either. The child seems to establish a syntagmatic relation between the functors and the nouns before arriving at the notion of a gender paradigm: (19)

le camion i(l) 'the truck (m)' 'it'

2;03,11

Müller: Gender

219

(20)

le papier eile 'the paper (m)' 'it'

2;04,08

(21)

le lapin mon lapin 'the rabbit (m)' 'my rabbit'

2;04,08

(22)

(le) robe ta robe 'the dress (f)' 'your dress'

2;06,08

(23)

la boule un petit boule 'the ball (f) "the little ball'

2;04,08

(24)

le lapin un lapin 'the rabbit (m)' 'a rabbit'

2;05,18

3.1.3.3. Summary: phase C. In both languages, phase C can be characterized by the emergence of almost all members of the functional projection DP. In German, there is hardly any evidence for the use of clear neuter functors; the child seems to hypothesize that German has two nounclasses, a masculine and a feminine class. When the respective contrastive form of a functor appears, both forms almost always seem to be assigned on the basis of semantic and phonological properties of nouns. Thus, the semantic primacy hypothesis is not confirmed. Also, the child does not yet seem to differentiate between elements which occur in D and those which occur in the specifier-position of the DP in the German system. This becomes evident when examining the inflection of the adjective. Nor does the child seem to distinguish different declension types at this stage. I assume therefore that all determining elements are generated under a single node (cf. 1.1.1.), for example, under D containing the AGReement features. Errors such as *un petit boule 'a little ball (f)' may possibly be interpreted as examples in which the adjective agrees with the D-element. Gender rules initially acquired establish a syntagmatic relation between a functor and a noun (cf. Mills, 1986a); distributional patterns do not yet exist. The child builds up agreement relations between functors and nouns before recognizing the existence of gender paradigms. First acquired gender rules are salient and clear. The dominance relation between gender rules seems to be acquired after the acquisition of the rules themselves. In German, gender marking is restricted to functors expressing nominative case. The notions "nominative", "subject", and "preverbal" may be clustered. This would imply that gender marking is restricted to a certain syntactic function/position. The question as to whether or not adjacency is relevant for the gender marking has to remain open, as in both languages, ADJ is adjacent to Nbar (inheriting the features of N) and D is adjacent to NP (inheriting the features of N) and members of both categories, ADJ and D, are marked for gender. If one interprets errors such as *un petit boule 'a little ball (f)' as examples in which ADJ agrees with D, then adjacency can be said to be irrelevant for gender marking. Finally, local cues seem to be important when the child

220

Two First Languages

makes gender assignments: with pronouns, errors almost exclusively concern agreement relations which exceed the limits of a single S. 3.1.4. Phase D. Phase D lasts in French and German from 2;07,06 until approximately 3 years (MLU Fr. and Ger.: approximately 3,4). This phase is characterized by the emergence of gender paradigms. At the end of this phase, Caroline enters a critical stage and sometimes refuses to speak French altogether. 3.1.4.1. German. Up to 2;08,19, one can still observe the avoidance of the neuter definite article: during the first period of phase D, no "das + N" sequence occurs. Neuter nouns are classified as either masculine or feminine nouns. At 2; 10,00, Caroline erroneously uses the neuter definite article with the masculine noun Schlumpf 'smurf'. From this point onwards, she no longer seems to be avoiding this article. Perhaps, she associates the initial sound [/] with neuter gender (cf. *das Schubkarre 'the pushcart (f)' at 3;00,02). Moreover, neuter nouns are used correctly with the neuter definite article: das auto 'the car (n)' (2;10,28), das tor 'the gate (n)' (2;10,28); it seems that the determiner das is employed in the gender-indicating function. The utterance *das schlumpf 'the smurf (n)' represents a violation of the animacy and personal rule. However, Caroline still does not use the pronoun das to refer to nouns with the features [+animate] and [+human]. During this phase, the masculine definite article der is - with one exception (*der blüme 'the flower (f)' at 2;07,06) - never overgeneralized to feminine nouns. Excluding its use with neuter nouns, 76% of all uses of the feminine definite article are correct. One of the erroneous assignments of the feminine definite article concerns the noun Sessel 'armchair (m)'. As has already been hypothesized by Mills (1986a), the fact that the plural of some German masculine nouns ending in -el is formed by leaving the noun invariant and using the plurifunctional determiner die (feminine singular/plural) might be puzzling for the child.47 Also with the feminine noun Blume 'flower', Caroline hesitates between using the feminine and masculine definite article, [e] represents a plurifunctional ending in German (singular, often feminine/ plural). It is interesting to note that it is only from phase D onwards that the plurifunctionality of nominal endings constitutes a problem for the child. This has to be compared with the acquisition of plural allomorphs. Finally, it is important to note that the majority of erroneous assignments of the feminine definite article occur in contexts requiring [-nominative] functors. One can observe a variation of the determiners den and die with a single noun. Both are used regardless of the gender of the noun. The use of the form den corresponds in 50% of all cases to that found in the target language.

Müller: Gender (25)

C: alles auf den boot 'everything on the boat (n)'

221 2;08,19

C: (in) die boot 'into the boat' What has been said with regard to the use of the definite articles holds also for the adjectival demonstrative. The forms of the demonstrative are used more frequently from the age 2; 10,00 onwards. About 70% of all adjectival demonstratives correspond to the target language. Errors occur exclusively in contexts requiring a [-nominative] functor. The demonstratives diese and diesen are used in free variation in these contexts. From 2; 10,00 onwards, the data also include examples of the correct use of the demonstrative with nouns ending in [e] (cf. phonological rule 12, Table 2f). Contrary to phase C, during which the use of the adjectival possessive and the indefinite article were frequently correct, errors with the adjectival possessive and the indefinite article amount to 43% and 33% respectively during phase D. Erroneous assignments are by and large restricted to these nouns ending in [e] which had already been assigned the correct forms meine and eine during phase C: e.g. *mein puppe 'my doll (f)' (2;07,06), *mein tasse 'my cup (f)' (2;08,05), *ein katze 'a cat (f)' (2;07,20), *ein lokomotive 'a locomotive (f)' (2;10,28). In addition to this, there are nouns ending in [e] which receive the correct form of the possessive and the indefinite article: e.g. meine sonne 'my sun (f)' (2;07,06), eine maschine 'an engine (f)' (2;10,00). The number of nouns which occur with both indefinite articles amounts to 30% (no examples with the possessive, which is used less frequently than the indefinite article, could be found in the data, although this may be interpreted as mere coincidence): *ein brill (=Brille) eine brille 'a pair of glasses (f)' (2;08,05), ein loch *eine loch 'a hole (n)' (2;08,05), ein elefant *eine elefant 'an elephant (m)' (2;08,05), *ein schraube eine schraube 'a screw (f)' (2;10,00), *ein rutsche eine rutsche 'a slide (f)' (2;10,28). At this point, it is important to mention that during phase D the definite articles and the adjectival demonstratives are almost always used correctly (in [-nominative] contexts) with nouns ending in [e] and other nouns: e.g. die puppe 'the doll (f)' (2;07,06), die brille 'the glasses (f)' (2;08,05), die schraube 'the screw (f)' (2;10,00). In terms of agreement relations, I assume that Caroline retains the agreement relation between the definite article/demonstrative and the noun and tries to establish an "agreement relation' between the definite article/ demonstrative and the possessive/indefinite article. This may be exemplified by the use of nouns ending in [e]: definite articles, adjectival demonstratives, indefinite articles and adjectival possessives were used correctly with nouns ending in [e] during phase C. The child may be said to have established an agreement relation between these determining elements and the nouns in question. During phase D, however, only definite articles and demonstratives still seem to agree with the gender of these nouns. Possessives and indefinite articles now constitute a separate class in as far as the child seems to use the forms of these categories regardless of

222

Two First Languages

the gender of the noun. This may be due to the fact that the child does not yet seem to know that the forms die and eine, for example, belong together, i.e. are members of the same gender paradigm. One may also hypothesize that adjectival possessives and indefinite articles now occupy a different position within the DP from definite articles and demonstratives (cf. 1.1.1.). At 2;10,00, Caroline has acquired the paradigmatic relation between die - meine and der mein/meiner. It is also interesting to note that if the numeral function of the indefinite article is stressed, the child seems to choose the 'uninflected' form ein: (26)

ich hab nich ein katze do not have one cat'

2;07,20

(27)

müssen wir ein schraube nur 'we must take one screw only'

2; 10,00

50% of all adjectival uses of the indefinite pronoun kein correspond to those found in the target language. The assignment of the form keine to the nouns Horn 'horn (n)' (2;07,06), Hand 'hand (f)' (2;08,05), and Mund 'mouth (m)' (2;08,05) may have been determined by the structure "X nasal (C)1 (cf. phonological rule 4E, Table 2 f ) . Unfortunately, it was not possible to establish which form of the definite article or demonstrative the child uses with all three nouns. This would be necessary for deciding whether the child also establishes an 'agreement relation' between kein, keine, etc. - like possessives/indefinite articles - and definite articles/demonstratives. There is only one example for Caroline's correct use of the feminine definite article with the noun Hand'hand (f)'. With pronouns, fewer errors occur than during phase C. This may be due to the fact that local cues seem to be less important. One can observe that the demonstrative pronoun der is never used to refer to feminine nouns. In contexts requiring a nominative functor, the pronoun die is only once used incorrectly to refer to a masculine noun, namely Opa 'grandpa'. This may be due to a phonological rule (cf. 3.1.3.1.). The remaining errors (29%) are restricted to neuter nouns and to contexts requiring a functor expressing [-nominative] case. One can observe a variation between the pronouns den and die referring to the same noun in [-nominative] contexts. The use of the accusative pronoun den corresponds in 57% of all cases to that found in the target language. The use of the demonstrative pronouns diese, diesen, etc. represents a typical case in which errors occur exclusively with neuter nouns and in [-nominative] contexts. In these contexts, the demonstratives diese and diesen are used in free variation to refer to the same noun. 63% of all assignments of the possessive pronoun correspond to those made in the target language. It is interesting to note that these errors are restricted to nouns which are already referred to with the correct (nominative) form of the demonstrative pronoun: e.g. der (=Pinguin,

Müller: Gender

223

penguin (m)) (2;07,20), *meine (=Pinguin, penguin (m)) (2;07,20). The child does not seem to have recognized the fact that the forms die - meine and der - meiner are related in gender paradigms. The indefinite pronoun is used only twice: keine (=Schraube) to refer to a screw (f) and * keiner (=Auto) to refer to a car (n). With the personal pronouns er and sie, one can observe that errors are made only with neuter nouns. Correct assignments concern nouns with the features [+animate] and [+human] and nouns ending in [e].48 These nouns are also referred to with the correct (nominative) forms of the demonstrative pronouns der and die during this phase. One may ask whether there already exists a paradigmatic relation between die - sie and der - er. If the gender paradigms were already represented separately in the lexicon (general paradigms), i.e. independently of the particular noun or noun-class, then neuter nouns, which are classified as either masculines or feminines, should be assigned functors coherently. This is, however, not the case: for example, in order to refer to the neuter noun Schwein 'pig', up to 2;07,20, Caroline uses the forms die and er; in order to refer to the neuter noun Huhn 'chicken', up to 2;07,20, she uses the forms der and sie. It may thus be the case that the child starts out with paradigms defined for a single noun or a class of nouns (for example, nouns ending in [e]) and only later proceeds to the organization of general paradigms being represented independently of a particular noun or noun-class in the lexicon. From 2;07 onwards, Caroline seems to have paradigms which are defined for a particular noun only or for a particular noun-class (for example, die - sie with nouns ending in [e]). This is exemplified by nouns such as Gabel and Stiefel, whose gender is not predictable on the basis of gender rules, and by nouns ending in [e], which appear to form a class of their own and whose gender is predictable on the basis of a phonological gender rule: (28)

(Gabel)

diese die schwarze meine *ein gabel eine schwarze 'fork(f)' 'this (one)' 'the black (one)' 'mine' 'afork' 'a black (one)'

2; 10;28

(29)

(Stiefel)

mein Stiefel meiner diesen einer 'boot (m)' 'my boot' 'mine' 'this (one)'

2;08,05

(30)

(-[e])

diese (=Schraube, screw (f)) 'this (one)' diese wiese (= la vis, screw) 'this screw' die (=Schraube, screw) 'this (one)' keine (=Schraube, screw) 'none' die schraube'the screw' *ein schraube'a screw' eine schraube 'a screw' *denrote (=Schraube, screw) 'the red (one)' die blaue (=Schraube, screw) 'the blue (one)' *ein blaue (=Schraube, screw) 'a blue (one)' diese ecke 'this corner (f)' eine schleife'a bow (f)' einemaschine 'an engine (f)' eine rutsche'a slide (f)' *ein rutsche 'a slide' eine kutsche 'a coach (f)' die brücke 'the bridge (f)' eine lokomotive 'a locomotive (f)' *ein komotive (=Lokomotive) 'a locomotive'....

2; 10,00-2; 10,28

224

Two First Languages

It will be seen that up to the end of phase D, the [-nominative] functors die and den (and also diese and diesen) and the indefinite articles are not yet part of noun-class specific paradigms. During phase D, the data also almost exclusively comprise nominalized 'adjectives*. Until 2;08,05, errors made with the inflection of the nominalized 'adjective" amount to 50% and can be characterized as follows: errors occur only if the indefinite article or a [-nominative] form of the definite article are present. With the indefinite article, "adjectives' are either not inflected at all or the ending -e is overgeneralized. Referring to a fish (m), Caroline uses, for example, ein gelber. *ein gelbe. *ein gelb 'a yellow (one)'. With the [-nominative] forms of the definite article, the ending -e is overgeneralized. At 2;10,00 and 2;10,28, 86% of the uses of the adjective (mostly nominalized) correspond to those found in the target language. The inflection is omitted only once when the indefinite article is present. It is interesting to note that occasionally it is the nominalized 'adjective· and not the determiner which seems to agree with the noun referred to, e.g. *den rote (=Schraube, screw (f)). The fact that at the end of phase D, there exists an agreement relation between adjectives and determiners, would imply that the child distinguishes between the weak and mixed declension types. At 2;07,20 and 2; 10,00, the first neuter inflections appear: ein rotes (=Madchen, girl (n)) and ein dickes haus 'a fat house (n)'. These examples also show that neuter gender, the third nominal class, emerges during phase D. 3.1.4.2. French. Usage of the definite articles almost always corresponds to target language usage; there are only two exceptions, namely *le voiture 'the car (f)' at 2;07,20 and *la oarage 'the garage (m)' at 2; 10,14. From this point onwards, the variation |e - la no longer occurs with the same noun. There are also some examples which could be taken as evidence in favor of the assumption that the natural gender rule has been applied. Caroline always refers to male dolls with the masculine definite article, e.g. le petit tomomme (=bonhomme) 'the little bonhomme', *le stroumph 'the smurf', and uses the feminine definite article for female referents, e.g. la femme 'the woman' (cf. also une fille 'a girl'). The adjectival demonstrative is not used in spontaneous utterances.

4Q

Contrary to phase C, during which the use of the adjectival possessive is almost always targetlike, one can observe that during phase D, 50% of the uses of the adjectival possessive correspond to those found in the target language. With indefinite articles, errors amount to 41%. Errors with the adjectival possessive involve nouns which are already combined with the correct form of the definite article, e.g. *mon femme 'my woman (f)'. 33% of all errors with indefinite articles occur with nouns ending in a nasal which have already been assigned the correct form of the indefinite article during phase C and which are used with the correct definite articles during phase D. Nouns with this ending also occur with both indefinite articles during this phase. These

Müller: Gender

225

erroneous assignments of the adjectival possessive and the indefinite article need not necessarily indicate that the child has classified the nouns incorrectly. As in German, one could posit that the child may be attempting to establish an "agreement relation' between the possessive/indefinite article and the definite article (the adjectival demonstrative is not used in spontaneous utterances). However, the child does not yet seem to have discovered which form of the possessive/indefinite article belongs to which form of the definite article. Usage of most pronouns corresponds to target language usage, regardless of whether or not the pronouns occur in dislocated constructions. There is evidence in favor of the assumption that demonstrative pronouns are selected on the basis of the formal and semantic features of nouns.50 The adjectival possessive ma 'my' is once employed as a pronoun referring to the feminine noun cloture 'fence'. Targetlike possessive pronouns do not yet occur. The indefinite pronoun tout is used twice, each time correctly. 64% of the uses of the personal pronouns N and eile correspond to target language usage. No errors occur in dislocated constructions (cf. discussion, phase E). The inflection of the adjective always corresponds to target language inflection. This is true for adjectives used both attributively and predicatively. There are several examples which indicate that the adjective may be in agreement with N and not with the determining element (cf. phase C): *un belle route 'a nice path (f)', *un belle voiture 'a nice car (f)'. Here, the form of the indefinite article contradicts the inflection of the adjective. In French, there are paradigms defined for single nouns whose gender is not predictable on the basis of gender rules, such as culotte. for example, and for noun-classes such as those containing nouns ending in a nasal. The indefinite articles and the personal pronouns H - eile do not yet seem to belong to noun-class specific paradigms. In French, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between noun-class specific, noun specific, and general paradigms. (31) (32)

(culotte) ([+nasal])

la bonne la culotte eile celle-lä 'pants (f)' 'the right (one)' 'the pants' 'it' 'this (one)' le champignon'the mushroom (m)' le (=champignon) il (=champignon) lepauvre champignon 'the poor mushroom' un gens 'a person (m)' *unegens'a person' un bonbon 'acandy (m)' un (=bonbon, candy) *elle (=camion, truck (m)) il (=camion, truck) *une avion 'a plane (m)' *elle (=avion, plane) il (=avion, plane) ton collant'your pants (m)' le collant'the pants' lepantalon'the pants (m)' *une chiffon 'a cloth (m)'....

2;07,20

2-07,06-2; 10,28

226

Two First Languages

3.1.4.3. Summary: phase D. In both languages, the child starts to construe gender paradigms, i.e. distributional patterns in the sense of Maratsos & Chalkley (1980). Also, a distinction between the weak and mixed declension type is made. Contrary to other determining categories, with definites and demonstratives nearly no errors occur. On the basis of these observations, it seems plausible to assume that in both languages, determining elements are generated under different nodes within the DP: definites and demonstratives under the D-node, other determining elements such as, for example, possessives and indefinites in the specifier-position of the DP. The agreement relations can be summarized as follows: Spec D "agrees with* D, D agrees with N (or a projection of N), ADJ agrees with D. Sometimes, the child seems to be unsure as to whether or not ADJ agrees with D or N (cf. French examples). In German, gender marking is still restricted to nominative functors. This may be interpreted as evidence in favor of the assumption that gender paradigms are set up in the nominative first. Adjacency is not relevant for the gender marking since at least in German, the adjective can be said to agree with D. Local cues still seem to be important for the gender marking, but clearly to a lesser extent (cf. the use of personal pronouns in German). In the formation of gender paradigms, the child seems to proceed as follows (evident in the German data only): coherent paradigmatic relations are first established for single nouns and noun-classes. The fact that in both languages, the indefinite article is still not yet incorporated into noun-class specific paradigms at the end of phase D may indicate that it has a special status in both the child's and the adult's system. This has to be further investigated. In German, there is evidence for the use of clear neuter functors, such as the neuter definite article; the child seems to hypothesize the existence of a third nominal class in German. There is no evidence in favor of the existence of a neuter gender paradigm. 3.1.5. Phase E. This phase lasts from 3;00,02 until approximately 4 years (MLU Fr.: approximately 4,5 Ger.: approximately 4,6). There is a relatively large gap between the end of phase D (2; 10,14) and the beginning of phase E (3;00,02). No recordings were made in between. A characteristic of phase E is that in both languages, the child now has two complete and general gender paradigms at her disposal (neuter nouns are assigned functors coherently), namely a masculine and a feminine paradigm.51 During this phase, the child constructs a neuter paradigm. 3.1.5.1. German. Around the age of 3;03 (MLU approximately 4,3), the child fully integrates the indefinite articles into their gender paradigms. From 3;02,24 onwards, the same is true for the accusative forms die and den.5^ It is worth mentioning that both forms are overgeneralized to contexts requiring the nominative forms. The following self—correction is the latest example of this overgeneralization:

Müller: Gender (33)

A: C:

C:

227 Caroline was hat denn dein mann heute gemacht 'Caroline what did your husband (m) do today?' die hat.a.den ha.den hat de.a.den den den hat (sich) verletzt (=her was.a.him.him was h.a.him him him was wounded) 'he was wounded' so hat (d)er gemacht 'he did it like this'

3;03,17

At 3;04,07, the first dative form occurs: in der hand 'in the hand (f)'. Caroline has no difficulty in using the dative correctly where the gender marking is concerned. Dative forms occur later than accusative forms with nouns of all genders. Just as in phase D, it may also be observed that agreement which exceeds the limits of a single S does not present more problems than local agreement. As for feminine and masculine nouns, it is also worth noting that almost no noun is classified incorrectly. Also, the inflection of the adjective is always correct. Caroline, however, still has problems with the assignment of the possessive sein: (34)

seine zunge (Mickey Mouse (f)) 'his tongue (f)'

3;02,24

(35)

seine jacke (bear (m)) 'his jacket (f)'

3;04,21

(36)

*seine uhr (mommy (f)) 'his watch (f)'

3; 10,20

(37)

seine frau (the husband's wife (f)) 'his wife'

4;00,08

(38)

*sein mann (the wife's husband (m)) 'his husband'

4;00,08

The possessive is used in accordance with the gender of the "possessum" but not in accordance with the gender of the 'possessor*: the child shows only awareness for syntactic gender. This has also been documented with German monolingual children (cf. Mills, 1985). The use of neuter functors and neuter nouns requires a more detailed discussion. Almost no errors occur with neuter function words or modifiers, i.e. masculine and feminine nouns are almost never classified as neuter nouns (exception: *das Schubkarre 'the pushcart (f)' at 3;00,02). It is also worth noting that from 3;00,02 onwards, feminine functors are no longer used with neuter nouns. Errors consist of the use of masculine functors or modifiers with neuter nouns. Most of these nouns are monosyllabic (Rad 'wheel (n)', Schwein 'pig (n)', Huhn 'chicken (n)', Bein 'leg (n)', Ei 'egg (n)'); the child may possibly associate monosyllabicity with masculine gender (cf. Kopeke (1982) and footnote 31). Up to 3;09,22, the small number of neuter nouns

228

Two First Languages

which are correctly used with neuter function words and modifiers almost always represent exceptions to the gender rules used for assigning masculine gender in the adult system (except for Bett 'bed (n)' and Haus 'house (n)'); their gender may have been memorized by the child: for example, das fenster 'the window (n)' is an exception to the rule on the basis of which the cluster -er is associated with masculine gender; das stuck 'the piece (n)' is an exception to the phonological rule 18E (cf. Table 2f), according to which masculine gender is assigned. With regard to these observations, one may pose the question as to why only neuter nouns are classified as masculine nouns. One would expect the child also to classify masculine nouns as having neuter gender since according to some gender rules in German, both masculine and neuter gender are assigned. As has already been observed in section 1.2.3., neuter gender is chiefly characterized by a disassociation with particular endings, whilst no clear associations are observable. This peculiarity of the German gender system is reflected in Caroline's gender assignments: the child has apparently acquired rules which assign feminine or masculine gender, but virtually no rule which assigns neuter gender or masculine and neuter gender; most neuter nouns seem to be learned as exceptions to gender rules which assign masculine gender. However, neuter gender clearly seems to be disassociated with feminine endings: no neuter noun is erroneously classified as feminine. As has already been observed at the end of phase D, neuter gender constitutes a third nominal class in Caroline's lexicon (cf. e.g. the overgeneralized neuter inflectional ending -es with nominalized "adjectives': 3;06,16 *das gelbes (piece (n)) 'the yellow (one)', 3;06,16 *dies weißes (piece (n)) 'this white (one)'). The beginning of the formation of a neuter gender paradigm becomes apparent when considering neuter functors which are combined with neuter nouns: for example, with the neuter noun Haus 'house (n)', the function words mein, ein, kein, and the neuter definite article das are used, and thus probably associated with each other. The observation that the masculine accusative form den is still used with this noun (and other neuter nouns) may possibly mean that the neuter paradigm, too, is first set up in the nominative (cf. also the inflection of the nominalized "adjective", e.g. 3;08,25 das an(dre) (=baby (n)) 'the other (one)', *ein andren bibi 'another baby (n)'). One could hypothesize that the relatively late formation of the neuter paradigm in German is due to an erroneous hypothesis on the child's part: in view of the fact that French represents the dominant language during early developmental phases, Caroline might hypothesize that German, like French, has two genders. This still has to be verified with monolingual German children. One might also assume, however, that the perception and the acquisition of the neuter gender paradigm is complicated by the following factors, which are independent of the child's bilingualism: - the neuter form of the definite article has a deictic function and is not used solely as a determiner.

Müller: Gender

229

- the masculine and neuter gender paradigms are identical for quite a large number of function words. - German has some gender rules which assign both masculine and neuter gender. - in German, neuter gender is assigned through a relatively small number of gender rules. 3.1.5.2. French. As has already been observed for German, the indefinite articles are fully integrated into the gender paradigms at approximately 3;03 (MLU approximately 3,8). The feminine noun maman 'mommy (f)' is used with masculine and feminine functors. One may hypothesize that the assignment of masculine and feminine functors to the noun maman is due to the fact that this noun lies within the scope of two gender rules, namely the natural gender rule and the phonological rule 18 (cf. Table 2e) according to which masculine gender is assigned. The different gender assignments to maman may indicate that the child does not know that the semantic rule is dominant in this case. The gender assignment to the nominal compound une bebe-poupee 'a baby (m)-doll (f)' at 3;08,25, meaning a little doll, is interesting in that feminine gender is most probably assigned to the whole compound on the basis of the feminine gender of the head of the compound poupee 'doll'. Caroline still has problems with the correct use of the pronouns il and eile. During phase E, 78% of all assignments of the personal pronouns correspond to those made in the target language. The majority of errors cannot be explained by the application of concurring gender rules. The fact that almost all errors (except for: lui il va la.la maman 'him he goes there.tne mother (f)') are restricted to non-local agreement could indicate that local cues are important here. However, the fact that errors occur almost exclusively with the pronouns il and eile still remains to be explained. Also, one would expect the child to have similar problems in German, which is not the case. Cohen (1927) observes that in the French children he studied up to the age of 5 numerous errors occur with the plural pronouns ils and elles (cf. Meinen & Kadow, this vol.). With regard to gender marking, errors are restricted to these forms. Cohen (1927:208) assumes that these errors can be explained by the observation that personal pronouns are scarcely distinguished in the spoken language. Frequently, the forms are shortened and thus, no clear distinction can be made between the masculine and the feminine form. After 3; 11,03, Caroline no longer has problems in assigning these forms correctly. 3.1.5.3. Summary: phase E. In both languages, all masculine and feminine functors are incorporated into the respective gender paradigms. In German, the neuter paradigm is probably set up in the nominative.

230

Two First Languages In German, the child seems to learn most neuter nouns as exceptions to gender rules

according to which masculine gender is assigned. The observation that most neuter nouns are never classified as feminine nouns, but contrary to this, are virtually always assigned masculine gender perhaps reflects that the child clearly disassociates neuter gender with feminine endings and that she has problems in formulating gender rules which assign either neuter gender or both masculine and neuter gender. Local cues no longer seem to be relevant for the gender marking. The dominance of one gender rule over the other is still learned for some nouns. 3.1.6. Phase F. The period after 4;00,08 (MLU Fr. and Ger.: more than 5) does not constitute a new phase in French. By and large, the French gender system can be said to have been acquired by this time, i.e. the child now has at her disposal a gender rule system and a masculine and a feminine gender paradigm. Presumably, some complex gender rules are still learned by the child, such as the assignment of the correct gender to complex nouns. It is worth mentioning that Caroline also associates certain suffixes with a particular gender, for example, -eur is associated with masculine gender le ronchonneur 'the grumbler (m)' in accordance with the adult system (cf. Table 2c). At 4;08,16 there is one example in the data which indicates that the child associates the suffix -ise, denoting female persons, with feminine gender (cf. Table 2c): ie suis une une gor.QOurmandise de bananes (=je suis une gourmande de bananes)

am a gourmand (f) of

bananas'. In German, errors are almost restricted to neuter nouns. Concerning nominal compounds, Caroline seems to have problems with the last-member rule. Although most compounds are assigned the correct gender, assignments such as *ihre nachthemd 'her night-dress (n)'- *'ne (=eine, nightdress) and das nachthemd 'the nightdress (n)' - 'n nachthemd (=ein) 'a nightdress (n)' indicate that this is a problematic area. Elsewhere, Caroline correctly uses both nouns of the compound, die nacht 'the night (f)' (4;03,02) and 'n hemd (=ein) 'a shirt (n)' (4;00,20). At 4;09,13, there is an example of the application of the natural gender rule which leads to an erroneous assignment. Here, the child applies both a formal and a semantic gender rule. (39)

A: was soll ich denn malen? 'what shall I draw?' C: ein mädchen die im garten ist 'a girl (n) who is in the garden'

CO

4;09,13

From 4;00,08 onwards, one can observe that there are still some neuter nouns which are assigned masculine gender, e.g. Schaf 'sheep (n)'. However, Caroline now also erroneously assigns neuter gender to masculine nouns, e.g *das rock 'the skirt (m)' (4;03,29). These nouns

Müller: Gender

231

lie within the scope of the adult gender rules according to which masculine and neuter gender are assigned (phonological rules 15E and 20E, cf. Table 2f). It seems plausible to assume that from 4 years onwards, Caroline revises her rule system and formulates gender rules according to which both masculine and neuter gender are assigned. Caroline still uses masculine accusative functors and modifiers with neuter nouns. This observation might be taken as evidence in favor of the assumption that the neuter paradigm is first set up in the nominative too, as has already been hypothesized for phase E. After 4;06,16, these kinds of errors disappear; at this point, the child seems to have acquired the complete neuter paradigm. 3.1.6.1. Summary: phase F. In German, the child acquires the complete neuter gender paradigm. In addition to this, the child seems to revise her gender rule system, i.e. she formulates gender rules on the basis of which both masculine and neuter gender are assigned. 4. CONCLUSION. In French and German, gender begins to be marked around the age of 2 (MLU approximately 2). Gender marking seems to represent a rule-governed behavior. Semantic and formal gender rules seem to be acquired simultaneously contrary to the prediction of the semantic primacy hypothesis. First gender rules are salient and clear. Rules which apply to a great number of nouns are acquired early. Initially, the child appears to establish a syntagmatic relation between functors/modifiers and nouns. An awareness that gender-marked forms are related in gender paradigms can be observed from 2;07 (MLU approximately 3,4) onwards. In German, it is apparent that gender paradigms are set up in the nominative first; the neuter paradigm seems to appear later than the masculine and the feminine paradigm. Excluding neuter gender, both gender systems are acquired at around the age of 3;03 (MLU Fr.: approximately 3,8 Ger.: approximately 4,3). The German gender system - including the neuter paradigm - is acquired at around the age of 4;06 (MLU: more than 5). It would appear that, even at this age, the child is still learning complex gender rules, for example, the assignment of the correct gender to nominal compounds. As for the child's bilingualism, it is worth mentioning that in the literature on the acquisition of the French gender system, the acquisitional order •syntagmatic gender > paradigmatic gender· is not documented.54 This must be further investigated in longitudinal research work on the acquisition of French by monolingual children in order to be comparable with the present study. The child's behavior may possibly be influenced by the German gender system, i.e. by the agreement relations within the German noun phrase. The child seems to hypothesize for both French and German that determining elements are located under different nodes within the DP.

232

Two First Languages

5. FOOTNOTES.

1. I am grateful to all participants of the DUFDE research group for their help. In particular, I would like to thank Klaus-Michael Kopeke, J rgen Meisel, and Caroline Koehn who have devoted many hours to discussing my ideas. Thanks go too to John Sims and Sarah Williams who have lent me their competence as native speakers of English. 2. See Mok (1968) for the regular formation of the feminine form of the adjective. 3. Apart from a few exceptions which are not considered here, the declension of articles, possessives, and demonstratives follows the strong declension type. 4. Olsen (1988:27) assumes the existence of this structure for the possessive only. 5. The term "disassociation" denotes the elimination of the possibility of one gender (cf. Altmann ARaettig, 1973). 6. In the following text, [e] stands for the sound schwa. 7. See Dubois (1965) and Grevisse (1980). 8. See Kopeke (1982) and Zubin & Kopeke (1983). 9. These Tables are not exhaustive. 10. See Dubois (1965). 11 Cf. Altmann & Raettig (1973), Kopeke (1982), Tucker et al. (1968, 1977), Rossi (1967), Mel'cuk(1974). 12. See Hoeppner (1980), Ivanova (1985), Zubin & Kopeke (1984). 13. See Tucker et al. (1977). The calculations for Tables 2e and 2f have been carried out by myself. 14. The number in parentheses refers to the absolute number of nouns for which the rule correctly predicts the gender. 15. The number of nouns with this particular ending. 16. The number in parentheses refers to the absolute number of exceptions to the rule. 17. See Kopeke (1982), Kopeke & Zubin (1983), Mills (1986a). The symbols used in this Table have the following meaning: E = rule applies to monosyllabic nouns X = any element in initial position Υ = any element in final position V = vowel; V+/-long = long/short vowel; V+long+high = [i:], [u:], [y:] C = obligatory consonant (C) = optional consonant {x y} = χ and y are alternatives Stop = [p], [t], [k] FJ = number of final consonants 18. No exact numbers are available, cf. Mills (1986a). 19. No exact numbers are available, cf. Hoeppner (1980). 20. Mulford & Morgan (1983a, 1983b) make the same observation: Icelandic 3-6 year-old children make more erroneous gender assignments with pronouns. Contrary to this, Schneuwly (manuscript) does not observe any difference between local and non-local agreement in the 36 year-old German children he tested. 21. For the reasons for this see Collings, this vol. 22. MLU stands for Mean Length of Utterance (cf. Brown, 1973). 23. Dolitsky (1983) calls this phase "the birth of grammatical morphemes". 24. I will begin with the discussion of the French data, as French is the dominant language during this period. 25. Because of their possible holophrastic, unanalyzed character, I only took into consideration nouns which also appear without any determining element. 26. For the functions of this form see Berkele (1983) and Williams (1988). 27. Because of the fact that Ivar first overgeneralizes the masculine/neuter indefinite article, frequency seems to have more predictive power than saliency.

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28. In Ivar's speech, definite articles also occur later than indefinite articles (in both languages). 29. This can also be observed in the speech of Ivar. 30. The principle of unifunctionality is not always able to provide an explanation. I assume that the determiner die - a plurifunctional form in the German system - is simultaneously used in the gender-indicating and the plural-indicating function by Ivar (Koehn (1989) examined the first occurrences of die in plural contexts in Ivar's speech). One may hypothesize that if the diverse functions are to be marked on the same category, in this case "determiner", then from the outset, the child will be able to use one form in different functions. This is not the case with French [la] and German [das]. The fact that these forms also have a deictic function in the adult systems may be an important factor in the child's usage of them. 31. Ivar tends to prefer to use the masculine definite article with neuter nouns. He chooses the feminine article if the noun is perceived to have a feminine ending, e.g. -a: *die zebra 'the zebra (n)'. The assignment of the masculine definite article to a large number of neuter nouns may have been conditioned by the monosyllabic structure of these nouns. This may be the reason why the child also assigns the masculine definite article to feminines such as Tür 'door' and Zahl 'number'. 32. This is also true for Ivar with the exceptions Tür 'door (f)' and Zahl 'number (f)' which receive the masculine definite article (cf. footnote 31). 33. In Ivar's speech, the ending -a also seems to condition the assignment of the feminine definite article. 34. Cf. Table 2f. 35. It is interesting to note that her data also include the erroneous assignment *die ooa 'the grandpa (m)' (2;04). 36. Number is probably marked by children before gender (cf. Koehn, 1989). However, on inflected elements such as the definite article, number and gender seem to be marked simultaneously (cf. footnote 30). This cannot be explained by semantic primacy. 37. Additional evidence for the early acquisition of this rule comes from Ivar. He has a tendency to overgeneralize the determiner die in front of nouns ending in [e], e.g. *die hase 'the rabbit (m)'. 38. The terms nominative, accusative, dative are used with respect to the adult system. 39. One may explain this overgeneralization by the high frequency of the form in the paradigm of the definite article (cf. 1.1.2.). 40. This can also be observed in the speech of Ivar. 41. I adopt the traditional analysis of dislocated constructions: one category is moved, leaving a trace which is occupied by an anaphoric pronoun carrying all the AGReement features of the moved category. 42. In Ivar's speech, I also found the local hierarchy "single S > multiple S" which represents a hierarchy of complexity for gender agreement. Ivar also makes almost no agreement errors in dislocated constructions, regardless of the position of the dislocated element and the anaphoric pronoun. 43. Ivar passes through a phase where he produces "Det + Adj + N" sequences with the adjective appearing in the uninflected form: *ein ru Schornstein (=rund) 'a round chimney (m)', *ein gro schiff (=groß) 'a big ship (n)', *der swarz auto (=schwarz) 'the black car (n)', *ein klein auto 'a little car (n)', *ein groß karton 'a big box (m)', etc. 44. Koehn (1989) comes to the conclusion that when the plural form les begins to be used, it is almost always correctly employed in plural contexts. In Caroline's speech, 'les + N- sequences correctly referring to more than one object already occur during phase B. 45. The demonstrative does not appear during phase C. 46. Unfortunately, from 2;02,09 onwards, the data include only one example of the application of the natural gender rule, namely le tomomme (=bonhomme, male doll) 'the bonhomme' at 2;02,09. 47. Ivar has problems with nouns ending in -er: *der fmlasser (=Wasser) 'the water (n)' (2;11,17) *die führer 'the driver (m)' (3;00,19). This ending is plurifunctional in German: it is a singular (often masculine) and plural ending. 48. Again, one can observe that from quite early on, pronouns are used according to phonological and semantic gender rules (cf. 3.1.3.1.).

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49. The feminine form cette is used once in an imitation. 50. Cf. 3.1.3.1. 51. Mills (1986a) also finds out that around the age of 3, children have acquired gender paradigms in German. She does not discuss the case of the neuter paradigm. 52. The accusative forms of the demonstrative are used correctly during this phase. However, one has to take into consideration that the demonstrative is rarely used. 53. In German, the natural sex of the referent may be marked on pronouns even if it does not correspond to the grammatical gender of the noun (e.g. Das Mädchen ist schön. Sie... 'The girl (n) is beautiful. She../). However, relative pronouns always agree with the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to which may or may not correspond to the natural sex of the referent (cf. Batliner, 1984:849). 54. Karmiloff- Smith (1978, 1979) finds out that distributional properties are disregarded by 3 year-old children when assigning gender to nonsense nouns. However, her results are not directly comparable with the results of the present study, since her subjects were already older than ours (3 years), her observations were based on an experiment, and only certain categories were considered.

CHAPTER 9

INFL-ECTION: SUBJECTS AND SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT 1

Jürgen M. Meisel

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0. INTRODUCTION. The truly pivotal function of verbs in syntactic constructions is acknowledged by most linguistic theories. Number and function of syntactic arguments, of semantically defined case frames, thematic roles, etc. are explained as depending on information contained in the lexical entry of the verb, or on information coded by means of its position in the clause or of its inflectional morphology. In addition, evidence from speech pathology as well as from experimental psycholinguistics indicates that this crucial role attributed to the verb is indeed "real" in the sense that it also appears in processes of language use. In view of these facts, one should expect to find in language acquisition, too, that the category verb and the various means of expressing its relation to other elements in the clause will play a cardinal role in the development of grammar. In this chapter, I therefore propose to do more than simply describe a number of phenomena of child language related to verb inflection (subject-verb agreement, use of modals and auxiliaries, etc.). I will suggest that the observed facts should be interpreted as evidence in support of the claim that children, at a very early point of development, already have access to grammatical knowledge and that this grammatical knowledge plays a causal role in the development of the child's verbal system. 1. INFL AND THE NULL SUBJECT PARAMETER.

1.1.INFL.

One might say that the present analysis is mainly concerned with the acquisition of INFL (or "I"). This category contains, among other things, [±finite], tense and agreement features. In addition, properties of INFL determine whether a language allows for lexically empty subjects or not. One should therefore expect to find that a variety of phenomena related to the different properties of INFL will be closely connected in language development. Provided that the available analyses of INFL are correct and supposing that the properties of this category can be parametrized (see, among others, Chomsky, 1981, Jaeggli, 1982, Borer, 1984), a number of grammatical devices should appear simultaneously in child language, or at least within a brief period of time, once the values of the parameters have been set. I will assume that X-bar theory permits structural descriptions like (1), see Chomsky (1986), Rizzi (1987)2: (1)INFL

>(AGR)AUX

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where AUX contains minimally +/-tense (and possibly aspect, etc.), and AGR contains the socalled phi-features, i.e. features for person, number, and gender, see Chomsky (1982). The Xbar schema of UG furthermore permits (2): (2)

INFL"^^^ NP

^"~~^- INFL' INFL

"- VP

where INFL" is the maximal projection of INFL, i.e. IP (=S). In other words, in IP (as well as in NP) the specifier position of the X' schema is filled by what is usually called the "subject1. The relation between INFL and the subject is of particular interest. For one thing, the subject must agree with INFL in its phi-features. And the head of INFL is a possible governor for the subject position. This is important since Case is assigned under government3. The question then is, which element assigns NOMinative Case. Chomsky (1981) suggested that AGR assigns NOM Case. From this it follows that NOM Case assignment by AGR is subject to an agreement requirement, i.e. AGR must agree in phi-features with the element to which it assigns Case. The phi-features in AGR and the Tense feature (T) must, of course, appear on a verbal element. This is achieved by a transformational rule, Rule R which used to be known by the name of Affix Hopping. It must apply prior to Phonetic Form.4 INFL thus lowers to V. 1.1.1. INFL in German. Note that what we have seen so far is mainly based on analyses of English, and one may well expect parametric variation in other languages, e.g. French and German, the languages we are studying. This is clearly the case concerning the ordering parameter. French is an SVO language like English and shares many word order patterns with that language. German, however, is an SOV language. Following Grewendorf et al. (1987), we will assume that a structure like (3) adequately describes the relevant facts for German sentences:

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(3)

CP

SpecC

ob die Vase auf dem Tisch 'whether the vase on the table (whether the vase stood on the table)

gestanden stood

hat has'

As can be seen from (3), the clause-final position of verbs in German is directly generated by the phrase structure rules of syntax. This reflects the canonical order in subordinate clauses as in (3); non-finite verbs in main clauses also appear in final position, as in (4). (4)

Die Vase hat auf dem Tisch gestanden The vase has on the table stood" 'The vase has been standing on the table'

Finite verbs, however, always hold the second position in main clauses. This is achieved by moving the verb into the (empty) C° position (see (3): the complementizer ob would obviously not be there in a main clause). Then, some maximal projection, e.g. the subject NP, is "topicalized", ending up in the SpecC (=TOP) position. An important point is that the verb does not go directly to C° from VP; rather, it is first raised into INFL (i.e. 1° in (3)) where the phi-features are located. In other words, finite main verbs have to be raised into INFL, and they are then moved into C° by a process of head-to-head-movement (Move INFL), an instantiation of Move Alpha. If, however, there exists an auxiliary in VP, it is this verbal element which is raised and moved. The latter option resembles the one in English. It is generally assumed that English auxiliaries are generated in the VP and then raised into AUX (under INFL), whereas modals are base generated in Aux (under a separate constituent), and in the case of main verbs, INFL lowers to V. German modals, on the other hand, by and large behave syntactically like main verbs - and so do auxiliaries, see Grewendorf (1986:10ff). In other words, in German one of the most crucial phenomena

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determining the order of elements in a clause is finiteness; in English it is important to distinguish between different kinds of verbal elements, i.e. main verbs, modals, and auxiliaries. 1.1.2. The importance of "strong* Inflections. The question which comes to mind immediately is: how does the child distinguish between main verbs, auxiliaries, and modals in each of these languages, thus assuring the right analysis for each one? The principal criteria to distinguish between the different kinds of verbal elements are their inflectional morphology and certain distributional facts (e,g. adjacency to the main verb). Hyams (1983,1986) argues that English modals can be recognized by their "defective morphology1. She claims, in fact, that in early English modals are "filtered out" because they are not analyzable as verbs, due to their lack of verbal morphology5, whereas Italian modals take the full range of verbal inflection for person, number, tense, and aspect". Since Italian modals behave syntactically like raising verbs, they are classified as such, i.e. they are main verbs generated in VP. Although Italian auxiliaries, essere and ayere 'be' and 'have', are said to be more "auxiliary-like", it is claimed that they are also generated in VP. Italian auxiliaries and modals can, however, be raised intoAUX. Formal properties are not, however, the only clues available to distinguish between different kinds of verbal elements in languages where such a differentiation is necessary in order to account for differences in syntactic behavior. Kratzer (1984), for example, argues that modals could easily be identified for semantic reasons. The correctness of this claim is by no means selfevident, but Kratzer does not elaborate on this point. It would nevertheless be interesting to test empirically the implications of such a hypothesis. If it is correct, the first modals used should form a semantically homogeneous class which, furthermore, should be easily distinguishable from main verbs. In addition, one would expect them to be treated differently in the course of the acquisitional process, e.g. certain syntactic operations should be performed earlier with modals than with main verbs. The traditional and still quite popular hypothesis concerning the "strength" of verbal inflections claims that rich inflectional systems license lexically empty subjects. This has been incorporated into Generative Grammar, e.g. by Chomsky (1981), Jaeggli (1982), Rizzi (1982), and Safir (1985), referring to Taraldsen (1978). The idea is that since AGR in INFL assigns MOM Case to the subject, and the subject has to agree with the verb in the phi-features of AGR, it appears to be justified to say that overt and clear markings on the verb are a necessary condition for the pronominal subject not to be filled lexically. More recently, these suggestions have been modified by Jaeggli & Safir (1989), as reported by Jaeggli & Hyams (1987). They argue that what licenses null subjects is "morphological uniformity" rather than inflectional richness. But null subjects also need to be "identified"; licensing alone is not sufficient. We will return to this point below in 1.2.

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Two First Languages Yet another interpretation of the term "strength" is implied in the studies by Pollock (1989) and

Chomsky (1988). Following a suggestion by Emonds (1978), they define strength of AGR in terms of its capabilty to attract verbal elements, independently of the kind of overt markings available in a language. In English, it is only strong enough to attract auxiliaries, whereas in French AGR is stronger than in English, i.e. it is able to attract all verbs. This brings us to our next section where some facts about French are briefly summarized. 1.1.3. INFL in French. Although there can be no doubt about the fact that French is an SVO language, the internal structure of INFL and the kinds of elements it may contain are by no means clear. We will assume, without further discussion, that the D-structure of French sentences corresponds to the structure given in (2) above. The question, however, is whether subject clitics (SCL) appear in subject position under NP, as is suggested by Rizzi (1986). Alternatively, one might suggest that SCLs are contained in INFL as manifestations of AGR, similar to what Rizzi (1986) proposes for Trentino. If one adopts the latter solution, French would be much closer to other Romance languages, like Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, languages which are classified as "pro-drop"; see below in 1.2. This proposal is based on the frequently discussed observation that, syntactically, SCLs do not behave like "ordinary subjects" and that, as a consequence, "French sentences with subject pronouns have no surface subject" (Chomsky, 1981:28). For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Kaiser (1988). In Generative Grammar, the problem has been studied by, among others, Kayne (1972, 1975) and Jaeggli (1982). But although it has been observed that "French does have some phonologically null subjects" (Jaeggli, 1982:93), there still remain some doubts about whether it may be classified as a "pro-drop" (or "null subject") language. Note that Hyams (1986:57, footnote 11) - though not Hyams (1983) - explicitly makes the claim that French is a pro-drop language. It differs from Italian and Spanish in that the pronominal agreement features, i.e. AG/PRO are phonologically realized in the form of a subject clitic. At this point, the issue cannot be pursued any further, and we have to refer to Kaiser & Meisel (to appear) where we argue that SCLs are, indeed, contained in INFL. It remains to be discussed whether INFL may contain (base generated) lexical material. Main verbs are clearly generated under VP; see 1.1.2. above. They move to tensed INFL, as is suggested by Rizzi (1987). Or, as Chomsky (1988:5) phrases it, "Emond's basic idea is that in French-type languages, V raises to I, while in English-type languages, I lowers to V." As for auxiliaries and modals, there is no reason to suppose that they differ from main verbs, if we go by the criteria mentioned in 1.1.1. and 1.1.2.1 will thus assume that all verbal elements in French are base generated under VP.

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1.2. Null subject phenomena. The brief survey in the preceding section of some of the properties of INFL has already shown that these are intimately related to problems concerning the use of subjects. Trivially, subject-verb agreement presupposes a specific kind of relationship between the subject and the category containing the agreement features, i.e. AGR in INFL; see above 1.1. More interestingly, it has been suggested that the possibility for lexically empty subjects depends on the structure and content of INFL. This refers to what is usually called the pro-drop parameter or the null subject parameter, e.g. see Chomsky (1981, 1982), Rizzi (1982). For convenience, we will repeat the major characteristics of the parameter, but we can be very brief, since good summaries are available, e.g. Hyams (1986:26ff). Although the parameter is primarily characterized by the lexically empty subject, the most interesting topic ... is the clustering of properties related to the pro-drop parameter (Chomsky, 1981: 240). That is, it has been suggested that pro-drop languages exhibit the following syntactic properties (Chomsky, 1981): (5)

(i) (if) (iii) (iv) (v)

missing subject free inversion in simple sentences "long wh - movement" of subjects empty resumptive pronouns in embedded clauses apparent violation of the that- trace filter

The crucial facts, however, are (a) and (b), since the other three can be derived from these, see Chomsky (1981). At any rate, constructions of these types do not yet appear in early child language; we may therefore ignore them in the following discussion. Unfortunately, the clustering of the first two properties has also been questioned recently. Safir (1985) argues that there exist languages which only show one of the two properties. We will not enter into this discussion but simply retain the claim that pro—drop languages exhibit a strong tendency (at the very least) to allow free inversion of subjects in simple sentences. Remember also that overt inflectional marking on verbs has been claimed to be a necessary condition for pro-drop phenomena; but doubts about this claim exist as well, see 1.1.2. In fact, Chomsky (1981:241) had already remarked that "The correlation with overt inflection need not be exact. We expect at most a tendency in this direction". What appears to be uncontroversial is the claim that the pro-drop phenomenon is related to specific properties of the category INFL. Rizzi (1982:153) remarked that "INFL is pronominal if and only if the preverbal subject is empty at S-structure." The pronominal INFL functions like a clitic, absorbing Case and thematic function. It acts as a proper governor and, as such, licenses an empty NP in subject position. Hyams (1983,1986) modified the parameter, reformulating it as the

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AG/PRO parameter. This means that it is AGR which is pronominal in pro-drop languages. In fact, she argues, ...AG, in pro-drop languages exhibits all of the crucial properties of PRO, the element typically found in subject position of infinitivals... These crucial properties are the following: 1) PRO may be controlled, 2) it may be arbitrary in reference, and 3) it is ungoverned. "Little" pro, on the other hand, has definite reference and it must be governed. As was pointed out in 1.1., AGR is a possible governor; if, however, AUX in INFL contains lexical material, then AUX heads INFL and governs the subject position. Thus, in pro-drop languages, lexical material should never appear in AUX in tensed clauses. These remarks should suffice to show that lexically empty subjects depend crucially on the structure of INFL and on whether AUX in INFL contains verbal elements, e.g. modals or auxiliaries. As far as child language is concerned, null subjects can only be explained as a grammatical phenomenon not violating principles of UG if it can be shown that AGR governs the subject position. That this is indeed the case is the hypothesis defended by Hyams (1983, 1986). I will return to this problem below. A recent modification of the parameter, however, should be mentioned. Based on suggestions by Jaeggli & Safir (1989), Jaeggli & Hyams (1987) claim that licensing and identification mechanisms have to be kept distinct. They propose that what licenses a null subject is morphological uniformity. And "a morphological paradigm is uniform if all its forms are morphologically complex or none of them are.... Morphological uniformity is ultimately reflected on the verbal stems after whatever process affixes inflectional endings to a verb form." (p.6) Languages like Spanish, German, Japanese, or Chinese are all uniform in this sense, i.e. they either use only derived or only underived verb forms. They differ in that their inflectional paradigm either distinguishes all six grammatical persons (e.g. Spanish), or only some (German) - or they do not use inflection affixation at all. But this difference is not relevant for the licensing of null subjects. A crucial point, however, is that an additional mechanism is said to be necessary, "a mechanism by which the referential value of a null pronoun can be recovered". They claim that thematic null subjects must be both licensed and identified, whereas expletive null subjects only need the licensing condition. Identification is either achieved by agreement, or - in the case of languages which lack person-number agreement (e.g. Chinese and Japanese) - by "an overt c-commanding nominal - this will be the case for embedded subjects - or by a (possibly null) Topic. "Identification by agreement" is defined as follows (Jaeggli & Hyams, 1987:8) AGR can identify an empty category as (thematic) pro iff the category containing AGR Case-governs the empty category.

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In these terms, then, German is a uniform language which licenses null subjects. But only expletive null subjects are permitted since the identification requirement is not met. It is argued that in German Tense is located in COMP ... while AGR is located in INFL". This is not sufficient for the identification of thematic null subjects, for "We believe that the role of Tense in identification configurations is crucial because it is the source of Case assignment." For reasons of space, these arguments cannot be discussed here. Note, however, that they are by no means uncontroversial, as far as the analysis of German is concerned; see Grewendorf (1986) or v.Stechow & Sternefeld (1988, chapters 11,12). English is not a uniform language and does not allow null subjects. French is also treated as a "mixed language" by Jaeggli & Hyams (1987) who only consider verbal suffixes. If subject clitics are accepted as realizations of AG/PRO, however, it also qualifies as a morphologically uniform language, compare 1.1.3.. 1.3. The + pro-drop hypothesis for early child language. The issues dealt with in this paper have recently been treated in a highly stimulating albeit somewhat controversial fashion by N. Hyams (1983,1986). It would therefore be useful to discuss her work in some detail. Hyams (1983, 1986) reformulated the pro-drop parameter; she proposed instead the AG/PRO parameter briefly described in 1.2. above. Her main hypothesis is (1986:64): that the value AG=PRO is the "inital" value of the AG/PRO parameter, that is, the value assumed in advance of linguistic experience. According to this hypothesis, children will quite generally, i.e. irrespective of whether the language of their environment is a null subject language or not, begin constructing sentences guided by the assumption that pronominal subjects need not be filled lexically. If they happen to be acquiring a pro-drop language, their initial hypothesis is correct, and nothing else has to be done, as far as this parameter is concerned. This would be the case for Italian and other Romance languages. If, however, their mother tongue turns out to be a non-pro-drop language, they will have to reset the initial value of the parameter, thus restructuring their early grammatical system. This would have to happen if the language is English, German, etc. In this paper, I will limit the discussion to those apects which can be regarded as possible empirical evidence in favor of or as counterevidence to the +pro-drop hypothesis for early child language. The range of possible empirical evidence in favor of or against the hypothesis is already described by Hyams (1983, 1986) herself. The age range when the initial setting of the parameter is said to be on +pro-drop is the period from 1 ;6 (one year; six months) to 3;0. She mentions three major kinds of structural properties which are said to justify her claims: 1) the use

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of "subjectless" sentences; 2) the lack of expletive pronouns, e.g. pleonastic it, existential there: 3) the lack of "verbal auxiliaries, in particular, the modals". In what follows, I will examine some of the issues related to the +AG/PRO hypothesis, and I will formulate a number of questions which I will attempt to answer later in this paper, on the basis of our analysis of data from bilingual children. Let me begin with some general observations. First of all, it should be noted that the clustering of syntactic properties related to the pro-drop parameter, see 1.2. above, does not appear to exist in early child language. This is not necessarily an argument against the hypothesis under discussion. But it weakens the strength of the argument. Quite obviously, the case would have been much stronger if one could have shown, for example, that children use nominal subjects in postverbal position rather frequently during a phase when preverbal pronominal subjects are not realized. Secondly, all three empirical arguments are negative in nature, i.e. certain elements which are obligatory in specific contexts of the adult language are missing in child language. Again, this need not be wrong, but one would certainly make a stronger case if the hypothesis predicted correctly the appearance of some phenomena not present in corresponding structures of the adult language. The first and most important argument concerns the lack of lexically realized subjects. Hyams remarks that there exists a period during which utterances containing overt subjects do appear, but these constitute only a small minority of cases. The co-occurrence of sentences with and without lexical subjects is claimed to indicate that the omission cannot be due to performance limitations on length, nor to the syntactic complexity of the sentence. Yet this argument is not compelling, since performance limitations need not imply that the child is unable to use these constructions. Rather, performative or syntactic complexity might result in the child's avoidance of such structures, although s/he is indeed able to use them if necessary. But what determines the "necessity" to use a subject? Avoidance strategies are clearly pragmatic in nature. Note that in pro-drop languages, too, the use of subjects is determined by an avoidance strategy, i.e. what Chomsky (1981) called 'The Avoid Pronoun Principle7, quite convincingly classified as a pragmatic device by Hyams (1986:72f). Subject pronouns are thus used for emphasis, contrast, to clear up ambiguities, or to otherwise introduce new information not available from context, for example to mark a change in discourse topic. Given the fact that in the overwhelming majority of cases subjects function as topics , one might wonder where and how this approach is in conflict with a functionalist one. But functionalist studies tend to negate the existence of grammatical devices altogether. The position adopted by Hyams (1986:72) appears to be more plausible. She views 'The Avoid Pronoun Principle" as a pragmatic principle "though it clearly interacts with grammatical principles".

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This brings us back to where we started: why should missing lexical subjects in early phases of language development be interpreted as licensed by the AG/PRO parameter? The answer favored by Hyams is apparently the following. If the AG/PRO parameter was not set on a positive value in the children's grammar, we would have to assume that their grammatical system is different from that of adults, thus contradicting the stronger version of the continuity assumption. But this is perhaps not the only possibility. It might also be that children, during this early phase of grammatical development, are ready to violate those grammatical principles which interact with pragmatic ones. I will return to this point below. The second argument does not provide conclusive evidence either concerning the question of whether grammatical or pragmatic explanations are to be preferred. Although Hyams obviously argues in favor of the former, the late appearance of lexical expletives is also to be expected for pragmatic reasons. Since they represent a special kind of pronominal subject, the arguments given above apply to them as well. In addition, they are devoid of semantic content and do not carry pragmatic functions, see Hyams (1986: 92ff); they are therefore the best candidates for an avoidance strategy. The question, again, is whether this strategy can be blocked by the child's grammatical knowledge, i.e. that AGR is not PRO and therefore null subjects are not allowed. If the use of expletives is in fact indicative of a shift from +pro-drop to -pro -drop, the child should not use subjectless sentences any more after the appearance of the first expletives. This is apparently not the case. Hulk (1987:57) claims that in the development of French, the use of expletives does not differ from that of other subject pronouns. I will return to this point below. The third argument concerns the use of modals and auxiliaries. It is claimed that modals and be are acquired late in English. The explanation offered by Hyams (1986:77ff) is that modals cannot be analyzed by the child as elements in AUX, since this option is excluded by the alleged fixing of the AG/PRO parameter on the positive value. And they cannot be analyzed as main verbs, as in Italian, because of their "deficient" morphology. They are thus unanalyzable and are therefore filtered out" until the grammar is restructured in such a way as to allow for modals to appear in AUX. This is an interesting and empirically testable claim. It implies that modals should not appear before the child consistently uses lexical subjects. It should be noted, however, that there exists at least one problem with this analysis of modals. Inflection is obviously not the only formal property which helps to identify elements as verbs, nouns, etc. Distributional facts, word order, etc. also contribute to characterizing syntactic categories. The question then is why children cannot analyze English modals as verbal elements by observing, for example, that they are frequently preceded by subject pronouns. This third argument, however, has been revised by Hyams (1987), herself. The acquistion of English modals is thus not directly related to the null subject parameter, and their late appearance is not explained any more as a result of their "deficient morphology". The emergence of modals is now said to be dependent on the development of the tense distinction. The

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prediction, therefore, that modals will appear at the same time as null subjects disappear in English is also made by this revised version of Hyams' original analysis. As Jaeggli & Hyams (1987) argue, [+uniform] is universally the initial setting of the null subject parameter. But "once the English speaking child learns properties of the inflectional system and realizes that it is not uniform, s/he will abandon the null subject grammar." (p. 10) This is said to be the case when the child acquires tense morphemes, i.e. roughly at the time when modals emerge. 1.4. Predictions for language development. Summarizing some of the insights from the preceding sections, we will now try to formulate hypotheses about what we should expect to find in early child language concerning subjectverb agreement and the use of subjects. 1) The first hypothesis is based on the continuity assumption. It predicts that the phenomena studied are indeed grammatical in nature, i.e. they can be analyzed as subjects, verbs, inflection and agreement markers, etc. These grammatical devices are, of course, used to express semantic and pragmatic functions (thematic relations, topic-comment, etc.), but the underlying logic of their developmental pattern as well as their formal properties are determined by grammatical principles. No commitment has been made, so far, concerning the question of whether these principles are the same - from the very beginning of language acquisition on - as those in adult grammar, or whether they may undergo maturational changes. 2) The second prediction is derived from the theory of grammatical parameters. If language acquisition does indeed involve the setting of parameters for principles already available, this should have certain empirical consequences. For one thing, new information does not really have to be learned in the sense that something must be mentally stored which had not been represented previously. Instead, new information has a triggering function (Chomsky, 1981). As a consequence, a limited amount of exposure to the language to be "learned" should be sufficient. It may be limited in the sense that only some exemplars of the phenomenon in question need to be present in the input, and it can be limited in the sense that a short period of time is required ("instantaneous acquisition"). Furthermore, since the child does not have to test a large array of competing hypotheses, relatively few "errors' should appear in his speech. See Carroll (1989) for an illuminating discussion of these issues. Finally, the claimed clustering of properties related to one parameter should yield the appearance of several otherwise unrelated phenomena within a short period of time, e.g. at least a strong tendency to use free inversion of subjects together with null subjects. 3) The first prediction one can venture concerning more specifically the grammatical phenomena under discussion is that the appearance of agreement features - whether realized as verbal affixes or as clitics - should be closely tied to the use of subjects. Since AGR may act as a

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governor assigning MOM Case, elements in subject position could not be case-marked if AGR has not been acquired previously. Similarly, NOM Case-marking and subject-verb agreement should make their appearance in child utterances more or less simultaneously. Note that null subjects also depend on the internal structure of INFL, i.e. on which element governs and assigns CASE to the subject position. It stands to reason that if we are to interpret a lexically empty subject as a syntactic phenomenon, the syntactic conditions for the appearance of pro have to be

met. The situation may be different in sentences containing auxiliaries or modals which may also assign NOM case. Normally, they will take the tense and agreement features, but at least in languages like English, with 'defective morphology' for modals, these can be 'invisible' on the surface. This is, in fact, a general problem. Neither CASE marking nor agreement marking on the verb need to be visible in this sense. In other words, if there are no overt markings, this would not necessarily constitute evidence against our hypothesis, although it would certainly weaken this position. In a way then, this hypothesis is easier to confirm than to refute empirically. Note that the 'Morphological Uniformity" hypothesis makes similar predictions. Children are claimed to start out with the assumption that their language uses a uniform paradigm. Null subjects are thus licensed. They are identified either by AGR (e.g. in Italian) or by a null Topic, in languages like early English.9 In the case of "mixed languages", then, the emergence of inflected verb forms will entail the systematic use of lexically filled subjects. 4) The finite vs. non-finite distinction for verbal elements is one of the most basic grammatical features to be discovered by the child. The order of elements in a clause depends crucially on the [+/-finrte] opposition; Move INFL, as it is understood now, could not apply without referring to this distinction. The prediction thus is that the placement of German verbs in second position is only possible with finite verbs, since they are moved there from 1° where the phi features are located. Under the analysis proposed by Jaeggli & Hyams (1987), similar facts are predicted, although the explanation differs substantially. They argue that in the early grammar of German, tense features are indeed located in INFL with the agreement features. This is why the identification requirement is satisfied. The early grammar would then have to be restructured such that tense feaures are situated in COMP. The prediction here is that verb second order is only possible after Tense has been acquired and is moved to COMP. Note that the use of verb inflection is interpreted as indicating the acquisition of Tense. Similar predictions can also be made for French. From the analysis proposed by Pollock (1989) and by Chomsky (1988) it follows that V raises to INFL. As a consequence, finite verbs should precede the negative element pas and VP-adverbs. 5) Kratzer (1984) suggested an Inflection Parameter. Assuming that inflections are attached to their stems in the morphological component of the grammar (eliminating Rule R/Affix Hopping

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in syntax), she claims that it is the "strength" of the inflectional affix which determines the •headedness of verbs". In other words, in languages like German, i.e. with strong inflections, INFL is the head and there is no VP node, whereas in languages such as English, V is the head. This has important implications for language acquisition. It predicts that in German, before they acquire verb inflections, children will initially treat verbs as heads and project maximal categories as in English, i.e. VPs. As Kratzer (1984:34) herself notes, one may further assume that children use the same rules as adults, i.e. they 'know' that only INFL can be fronted by the rule of 'Verb Fronting'." From this it follows that only after verb inflections are completely developed, will verbs be fronted as in adult language. Prior to this, only modals are fronted; these are immediately assigned to INFL because their meanings help to identify them. Note that this explanation is diametrically opposed to what is suggested by Hyams (1983, 1986) for the acquisition of English, i.e. that modals appear rather late in children's speech because they cannot be analyzed as verbal elements. 6) In English, it may be crucial to distinguish between modals, auxiliaries, and main verbs, for children may depend on overt markings of phi and tense features to be able to do so. As for French and German, syntactic considerations do not predict a significant difference between the acquisition of modals and main verbs - as opposed to English where modals exhibit "defective morphology" and syntactic behavior different from that of main verbs. In fact, French auxiliaries should be detected most easily by children, since they possess the richest morphological system. If one adopts the revision of Hyams (1983,1986) suggested by Hyams (1987), overt markings are not the most crucial phenomenon. What matters is the development of the "tense distinction". According to this analysis, modals should appear more or less simultaneously with the infinitive marker to and the productive use of inflection on main verbs. 7) X-bar theory is supposed to be universal. Thus, the child would not have to learn structures like (2) in 1.1. What has to be discovered is the order of elements, see (2), as opposed to (3) in 1.1. Also, children have to discover whether the language(s) they are learning allow lexical material in AUX or not. The featural composition of INFL is universal, but again, what has to be learned is how and where these features are phonetically realized, e.g. as verb suffixes in languages with rich morphological systems. Word order is likely to be a parametrized option, see (2) above; it should therefore be acquired through a triggering process. The realization of the features in INFL, on the other hand, will have to be learned - in the traditional sense. 8) If Hyams (1986) is right, i.e. if early child language is a null subject language, subjects should be omitted more frequently than other elements. Once the child uses expletive subjects, however, s/he should have reanalyzed his/her grammar as -pro-drop. This means that expletives should not co-occur with null subjects. Similarly, it is predicted that null subjects will disappear when modals emerge in child language. To this I would like to add that postverbal subjects may be expected frequently. This may not be true for German, if this phenomenon

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indeed depends on positive evidence, as is claimed by Hyams (1986), but it does apply to French where dislocated subjects constitute the kind of positive evidence needed. 2. GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT.

In what follows, we will present an empirical study analyzing the language use of bilingual children acquiring two first languages simultaneously, German and French. The results of this analysis will be discussed in the light of the theoretical assumptions dealt with in the preceding section. In particular, the predictions for language development outlined in 1.4., above, will be examined in view of these empirical findings. The present analysis focuses on the speech of three children, C, P and Iv. P and C were 12 months old, Iv was 1;3,24 (1;0,0 = years; months, days) at the beginning of the data collection period. The study begins with the children's first two-word utterances. Before turning to the analysis of the linguistic development of these children, I will very briefly summarize some earlier findings concerning the onset of grammatical encodings. These remarks are based on the studies of C and P by Berkele (1983), Meisel (1985,1986) and Müller (1987); see also Schlyter (1989) for additional analyses of temporal/aspectual expressions by Iv and other children. As is well known, grammatical development does not proceed at an equal rate during the process of language acquisition. Rather, one finds that after a certain period during which few changes can be observed, there exist periods characterized by rapid developments in various areas of grammar. It should be useful to identify such active periods. We may then examine the question of whether the phenomena under investigation appear during the same phase or earlier/later than the other devices. The analysis of devices expressing tense-aspect-modality (TMA) revealed that both C and P begin to use such forms systematically when their MLU values reach 2.0, i.e. at about age 2;02;1 (C) and 2;9-2;10 (P), respectively; see Meisel (1985, section 3.4) for more details. In other words, in spite of considerable age differences, MLU proved to be fairly reliable. Up to this point of development, the use of different verb forms could be predicted on the basis of semantic characteristics of the verbs. Action verbs appeared as infinitives and imperatives, whereas French change-of-state verbs showed up as past participles. From this moment onwards, the children begin to explore formal properties of the verbs, independently of their semantic values. They use different forms of the same verb; participles appear for the first time in German, and in both languages present tense forms are used with action verbs as well as with change-of-state verbs. These uses become productive at about MLU 3.0-3.5, i.e. around age 2;5-2;7 (C) and 3;1 3;3 (P). French passe compose (i.e. auxiliaries are combined with past participles) and the

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German past tense form war ('was') make their appearance during this period, and they clearly express temporal notions. This is confirmed by the fact that temporal adverbials are now also used, serving similar functions. French est ('is') now functions as an auxiliary; it had been used by C since 1;11, but up to 2;5 only in copula constructions combined with nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Articles are among the first grammatical morphemes to be used systematically. This observation is confirmed by studies investigating monolingual language acquisition; compare chapters 2 and 3, this volume. Berkele (1983) found that C begins using French articles between age 1 ;10 and 2;0. After 2;0, both definite and indefinite articles are used in a systematic fashion. In German, definite articles begin to appear at 2;0, indefinites only at 2;4. From then on, they are provided in the majority of contexts where the adult language requires them. Word order patterns and case markings provided the clearest evidence that children make use of grammatical encodings very early; see Meisel (1986). The two bilingual children started using language-specific word order constructions early during the two-word phase, e.g. verbsecond patterns (with topicalized adverbs or objects) only in German, whereas in French the verb is placed in third position in such contexts. In Meisel (1986:154ff), it was argued that this does, in fact, constitute strong evidence in favor of the claim that word order, at this point, is already determined by syntactic principles - not only by pragmatic strategies. For C, this development begins at age 2;0, and it stabilizes around age 2;4; for P, this happens during the age period 2;9-

3;1. Case markings come in at about the same time, i.e. during the phase which lasts from age 2;4 to 2;7 for C, and from 2;11 until 3;1 for P. At this stage, the opposition between NOMINATIVE, ACCUSATIVE and DATIVE is established. In French, the contrast between NOMINATIVE on the one hand and ACCUSATIVE/DATIVE on the other, is already expressed during the preceding phase, i.e. C 2;0-2;4 and Ρ 2;7-2;11. Note that these children also begin to use clitic object pronouns in French in preverbal position during the same phase, i.e. C 2;4-2;8 and Ρ 2;11 -3;2. As for gender marking, it is rather difficult to determine exactly when it is used productively; see M ller (1987, this volume) for details. It appears, however, that C begins to mark gender at around age 2;0; and a gender marking system is clearly established at 2;7. Summarizing one can say that there seem to exist two critical moments in the grammatical development of these children. Approximately at MLU 2.0, i.e. at Brown's (1973) stage II, they begin to use grammatical means of expression. For C this happens at age 2;0-2;1; for P at 2;9. Around MLU 3.0-3.5 (C 2;4-2;7 and P 3;1 -3;3) these developments are well established and new devices come in. In what follows, I will therefore pay special attention to these periods.

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3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF VERB INFLECTION.

In this part of my paper, I will describe the development of verb forms in the language of the bilingual children studied, before I turn to their use of subjects in the following section 4. The analysis begins with the children's first uses of verbs, i.e. what looks like an adult verb. Note that I will talk about "subjects", "verb inflection", etc. although one cannot know whether certain elements do indeed carry such syntactic functions, as long as the analysis is not completed. For the time being, this terminology should be understood as meaning "elements which would be analyzed as 'X' in the adult language". In the discussion in section 51 will argue that the empirical findings do, in fact, support the claim that these linguistic devices are grammatical ones from very early on. 3.1. Verb inflection in German. Tables 1 -3 present the results of the analysis of the verb forms used by the children.11 The first verbs occur in C 's data at the age of 1 ;912; Iv uses verbs for the first time at age 1; 10, and P at

2;6. In each column, it is indicated whether the verb is combined with a pronominal subject (p) or with a noun (or NP) in subject position (N), or whether the subject is missing (0). The figures give the frequency of occurrences of a specific form. This frequency is calculated on the basis of all occurrences at a given point of time. Thus, the figure ".4" in C's table for third person singular forms at age 2.0 means that, during this recording, she used 10 verbs, 4 of which had the 3rd person marking ^t, and were produced together with a pronominal subject. 3.1.1. Non-finite verb forms. Let us first look at the non-finite verb forms. Imperatives hardly ever appear together with subjects, thus following the adult norm. As for infinitives, two functions might be distinguished. In addition to the usual modal constructions, one finds uses of infinitives where this form functions pragmatically as an imperative. We will see that this kind of use is restricted to German; it does not occur in French. It is particularly frequent in C's speech. Occasionally, she even combines it with a subject. This gives the impression that one is dealing with a modal construction where the modal (soll, muß 'must, should, ought to') is omitted, e.g. (6)

bar schlafen 'bear sleep'

Note that C otherwise does not use infinitives in multi-word utterances - only in modal constructions. Strikingly enough, the bare infinitives disappear at age 2;4, exactly at the point where modals come in (2;5). This confirms the hypothesis that these uses may be interpreted as

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