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In:Nominal Compound Acquisition
Edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler, F. Nihan Ketrez and Marianne Kilani-Schoch
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 61] 2017
► pp. 91–118

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Chapter 4
Early development of compounds in two French children’s corpora

 |  | University of Lausanne
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.05kil
This chapter deals with early development of compounds in French, which is known to be a poor-compounding language. It compares the development of strict compounds and loose compounds, i.e. multilexical units that are lexicalized sequences of words corresponding to syntactic phrases, in two longitudinal corpora of Swiss-French-speaking children between 1;6 and 3;0. Results indicate that loose compounds largely prevail in the French data. Among them, multilexical units having a preposition are differentiated in terms of development and display selective errors suggesting a role of morphosyntactic complexity. The data also reveal unexpected cues of early productivity of a (strict) compounding pattern specific to CDS and CS.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.French compounding
  • 3.The data
  • 4.Method of analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1. Emergence of compounding: overall picture
    • 5.2Strict compounds
    • 5.3Multilexical units
    • 5.4Errors
  • 6.Lexical typology
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (38)
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Kilani-Schoch, Marianne & Aris Xanthos
2021. Derivational patterns in spontaneous data of French-speaking parent-child interactions before age three. In The Acquisition of Derivational Morphology [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 66], ► pp. 53 ff. DOI logo
Ketrez, F. Nihan
2020. Word formation through derivation vs. compounding. In Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries [Studies in Language Companion Series, 215], ► pp. 39 ff. DOI logo

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