The present study aims at analysing the role of infinitival clauses (INFCs) in German child-adult dialogue. In German subject-less INFCs are a grammatical sentence pattern. Extensive corpora of spontaneous speech between 6 children aged 1;5 to 2;10 and adults were analysed applying structural and contextual analyses. We extended Freudenthal, Pine and Gobet’s (2010) model of lexically specific learning to include INFCs in adult input. Results show that frequencies of adult INFC and MOD+INF clauses are related to child INFCs. We interpret these results as reflecting shared verb vocabulary and, regarding INFCs, as an adaptation of adult CDS to child grammatical structure. While most child INFCs have modal meaning, some occur in non-modal contexts. The majority of child INFCs are subject-less clauses with final infinitives and therefore grammatical. Results are discussed in terms of the pragmatic function of child and adult INFCs and the role of adult INFCs in German CDS.

本研究旨在分析不定式从句（INFC）在德国儿童与成人对话中的作用。在德语中，无主语 INFC 是一种语法句子模式。应用结构和语境分析，对 6 名 1;5 至 2;10 岁儿童和成人之间的大量自发言语进行了分析。我们扩展了 Freudenthal、Pine 和 Gobet (2010) 的词汇特定学习模型，将 INFC 纳入成人输入中。结果表明，成人 INFC 和 MOD+INF 条款的频率与儿童 INFC 相关。我们将这些结果解释为反映了共享的动词词汇，并且就 INFC 而言，将其视为成人 CDS 对儿童语法结构的适应。虽然大多数子 INFC 都具有模态含义，但有些子 INFC 出现在非模态上下文中。大多数子 INFC 都是带有词尾不定式的无主语从句，因此符合语法。根据儿童和成人 INFC 的语用功能以及成人 INFC 在德国 CDS 中的作用对结果进行了讨论。