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Article published In: Discourse-pragmatic markers, fillers and filled pauses: Pragmatic, cognitive, multimodal and sociolinguistic perspectives
Edited by Kate Beeching, Grant Howie, Minna Kirjavainen and Anna Piasecki
[Pragmatics & Cognition 29:2] 2022
► pp. 195–221

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Crosslinguistic paths of pragmatic development

The acquisition of actually and en fait by British and French children

ORCiD logo with link | University of the West of England
 | University of Ghent
Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.21027.bee
Abstract
Diachronic studies of discourse markers suggest they follow a unidirectional developmental path, from propositional to textual and expressive uses. The present study tests whether children acquire the propositional (literal) before the expressive (pragmatic) functions of two adversative discourse markers in French and English, which have similar core meanings and pragmatic functions. Our results partially confirm the propositional-first hypothesis but semantics and pragmatics appear to work together, rather than first one then the other, at least in this case, and this runs counter to both diachronic theories and usage-based accounts of L1 acquisition. 88 occurrences of en fait and 174 of actually were extracted from the CHILDES database, and coded for two functions (adversative and elaborative) and three domains (propositional, textual, expressive). The results suggest that the pragmatic functions of actually are used by children as young as two years old, but the same is not true of en fait, which is almost exclusively propositional in the early years. By contrast, before age 5, French children start to use en fait for textual and elaborative functions to a greater extent than actually. The role of syntactic position and parental input are discussed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background of the study
    • 2.1Functions of actually and en fait in contemporary spoken British English and European French
    • 2.2Actually and en fait in diachrony
    • 2.3Child language acquisition of DMs
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1First year of acquisition
    • 4.2Case study: Development till age 5
    • 4.3Analysis of input data
    • 4.4Position and function across children and adult data
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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