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In:Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 313–356

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Chapter 11
Developing strategies for encoding additive and contrastive relations in French and German child narratives

 | Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität
 | Université Paris 8 & UMR 7023, CNRS
Published online: 28 November 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.11dim
Abstract
Speakers of French and German differ in their preferred choice of information components for establishing contrastive and additive discourse relations. Whereas French speakers tend to relate and compare discourse entities to each other across utterances, German speakers prefer to relate and compare assertions. The current study explores at which age French and German children (ages 4, 7, and 10) acquire the preferred discourse organizational principles of their respective languages. In order to disentangle typical properties of children’s discourse at a certain age from features reflecting the acquisition of language-specific preferences, the same set of elicited production data is compared across languages and age groups. Results show that despite common developmental trends, the principles underlying additive and contrastive discourse relations in German are acquired earlier than those in French. Whereas the relatively uniform German pattern can be seen as a continuation of earlier stages of acquisition, the French pattern is slightly more complex: There is more variation in the input and the prototypical integration of the relevant devices requires certain morpho-syntactic structures to be mastered first. From age 7 onward, child learners of both languages hone in on their target language’s preferred discourse structure.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The acquisitional task for children learning French and German: Background and research questions
  • 3.The development of additive and contrastive discourse relations: Methods
    • 3.1The stimulus
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.The development of additive and contrastive discourse relations: Results
    • 4.1The target: Results from adult control groups
    • 4.2Development across age groups: German
    • 4.3Development across age groups: French
    • 4.4Cross-linguistic comparison
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (41)
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Cited by three other publications

Reimer, Laura
2023. The modal particle elicitation test. Pedagogical Linguistics 4:2 ► pp. 195 ff. DOI logo
Uth, Melanie & Marco García García
2018. Introduction. In Focus realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 201], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Benazzo, Sandra & Katia Paykin
2017. Additive relations in L2 French. In Focus on Additivity [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 278], ► pp. 265 ff. DOI logo

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