ABSTRACT

The study examines phases in developing specification of grammatical marking of emergent clause-combining (CC) as indicative of children’s growing ability to integrate two or more independent predications. To this end, both intra- and inter-clausal analyses were applied to all CC utterances produced by three Hebrew-acquiring children aged 2;0–3;0, covering both child autonomous productions and adult-child co-constructed CC. Based on four phases in CC construction shared by the three children, the following developmental trends were identified for both coordination and subordination in our database. First, children start combining two predications with lexical verbs early on, but these are confined to non-marked or adult-supported constructions. Second, early connective-marked CC involves mainly verbless copular or existential clauses. And autonomously produced lexical-verb combinations marked by connectives emerge several months later. This initial “trade-off” and gradual progression in grammatical specificity to full-fledged, lexically marked CC is interpreted as reflecting the developmental route of children’s early clause integration in interactive discourse.

摘要

该研究检查了制定紧急分句组合 (CC) 语法标记规范的阶段，以表明儿童整合两个或多个独立谓词的能力不断增强。为此，对三个年龄在 2;0-3;0 岁的希伯来语儿童产生的所有 CC 话语都应用了句内和句间分析，涵盖了儿童自主生产和成人-儿童共同构建的 CC。基于三个孩子共享的 CC 建设的四个阶段，我们的数据库中确定了以下协调和从属发展趋势。首先，儿童很早就开始将两个谓词与词汇动词结合起来，但这些仅限于无标记或成人支持的结构。其次，早期连接词标记的 CC 主要涉及无动词连词或存在从句。几个月后出现了以连接词为标志的自主生成的词汇-动词组合。这种最初的“权衡”和语法特异性逐渐发展到成熟的、有词汇标记的 CC 被解释为反映了儿童早期从句整合在互动话语中的发展路线。