The emergence of complex sentences in a French child’s language from 0;10 to 4;01: causal adverbial clauses and the concertina effect. Martine Sekali To cite this version: Martine Sekali. The emergence of complex sentences in a French child’s language from 0;10 to 4;01: causal adverbial clauses and the concertina effect.. Journal of French Language Studies, 2012, 22 (1), pp.115-141. ￿10.1017/S0959269511000615￿. ￿halshs-00663388￿ HAL Id: halshs-00663388 https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00663388 Submitted on 26 Jan 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. The emergence of complex sentences in a French child’s language from 0;10 to 4;01: causal adverbial clauses and the concertina effect. Martine Sekali University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense ABSTRACT This article tests Diessel’s ‘integration’ path of development of adverbial clauses (cf. Diessel, 2004), with special focus on the acquisition of ‘causal’ adverbial clauses, in the context of the overall development of grammatical/semantic complexification in a French child’s longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech (Madeleine, Paris Corpus) from 10 months to 4;01 years old. Three main patterns are retrieved in the child’s uses of parce que constructions in interactional contexts. Linguistic analysis of these constructions reveals a dynamic pattern of syntactic expansion, integration and diversification, here called the concertina effect, which may provide an insight into the cognitive and pragmatic motives for syntax development in first language acquisition of French. KEYWORDS acquisition of complex sentences, adverbial clauses, parce que, causal domains, concertina effect 1 I. INTRODUCTION Complex sentences have been studied rather extensively in adult speech using various theoretical frameworks. Commonly, a complex sentence is defined as a multiple-clause sentence, i.e. a sentence composed of at least two verbs (or predicates) linked within a hierarchical complementing structure (subordination) or conjoined in a non-embedded structure (coordination). Subtypes of complex sentences are thus distinguished cross- linguistically: with on the one hand, finite/non finite complement clauses; relative clauses and adverbial clauses, and coordinated clauses linked by specific morphemes such as and, or and but (or equivalent morphemes in other languages) on the other hand. Recent work in pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and more functionalist approaches (see for example Sweetser, 1990; Langacker, 1991; Cristofaro, 2003; Sanders 2005; Zufferey 2006; Sekali, 2010) have cast a new light on this issue. These studies have stressed the necessity to analyze and sub-categorize complex sentences, taking into account not only the syntactic, but also the semantic and pragmatic relations which are construed in complex ‘constructions’ taken as linguistic units paired with meaning. A study of the way children acquire, and spontaneously produce these constructions may provide an interesting insight into the nature of the link between the syntactic and semantico- pragmatic levels in the process of complexification. The most extensive and exhaustive study of the acquisition of complex sentences by children was made by Diessel (2004) on five English 2 longitudinal corpora of spontaneous parent-child speech from 1;8 to 5;11, and his findings follow on from results presented in Tomasello (2003). Cross-linguistic studies have also been carried out on some specific complex structures (Clancy et al., 1976 on conjunctions in Turkish, Italian, English, and German; Clancy et al., 1986 on the processing of relative clauses by Korean, Japanese and English-speaking children), but a similarly comprehensive study on the acquisition of French complex sentences in children’s spontaneous speech in longitudinal corpora remains to be done. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to compare Diessel’s results and conclusions on the paths of development of English complex sentences with our results based on a longitudinal corpus of French. The analysis is a case study based on Madeleine’s data (Paris Corpus) from 0;10 to 4;012. Secondly, after a short comparison of the overall onset and development of syntactic complexification in the data, the study will focus in particular on the acquisition of the first adverbial clauses to appear, namely ‘causal’ adverbial clauses introduced with the subordinator parce que (because). Using Sweetser’s domain categorization of causal clauses, we confront previous results on the acquisition of English and Dutch causals with our data. A cross-reference of the grammatical and semantic-pragmatic paths of complex construction development in Madeleine's data then leads us to consider the possible motivational link between the two. 1 For an overview of previous literature on this subject, see Bowerman, 1979 and O’Grady, 1997. 2 The collection and nature of Madeleine’s data is detailed supra in the overall description of the corpora under investigation throughout this special issue. 3 II. THE ACQUISITION OF COMPLEX CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH: DEFINITIONS AND RESULTS In Diessel (2004:41), complex sentences are defined in a usage-based functionalist approach as ‘grammatical constructions that express a specific relationship between two or more situations in two or more clauses’. In this definition, the term ‘situation’ (which will be used in this study), refers to what Langacker (1991, chapters 4-5) calls ‘processes’ or ‘states of affairs’, which are usually encoded in clauses rather than noun phrases: ‘a situation is a conceptual unit that has two important properties: situations are temporal and relational.’ (Diessel, 2004:41). This definition is particularly useful, especially for the analysis of child speech, where language use is observed in its dynamic development and not as a set of definite (or pre- defined) structures. Constructions which in syntax are commonly considered as complex clauses because they contain two or more verbs in two or more clauses may thus be better regarded as simple when one of the clauses does not encode a real process or state of affairs but simply elaborates on a single situation. This is the case, for example, with complement clauses such as I want to eat or Stop talking, where the matrix verbs want and stop do not express independent processes but function as modal or aspectual marks bearing on a single proposition. Interestingly, Diessel (2004) shows that the acquisition of all types of complex constructions in English follows a common pattern, from lexically- specific constructions or conversational routines, to truly bi-clausal constructions expressing a relationship between two or more situations. Yet Diessel suggests two different paths of development in the acquisition of 4 complex clauses according to subtypes. On the one hand, complement and relative clauses are acquired through a process of clause expansion from simple, non-embedded constructions (as in I want to eat), to ‘more complex constructions where the matrix clause and the complement clause express a specific relationship between two independent states of affairs’ (Diessel, 2004:73), as in You tell me what it is, for example. Adverbial and coordinate clauses on the other hand, proceed from the integration of two or more juxtaposed states of affairs into one grammatical unit. Diessel shows that in the acquisition of English, the earliest multiple-clause utterances produced by the children are juxtaposed clauses which suggest a semantic link that is not overtly expressed, such as in Hit the ball. Get it. Later, the conjunctions and and because are used, mainly to pragmatically combine utterances across speaker turns before they are used in truly ‘bi-clausal constructions in which two clauses are integrated in a specific grammatical unit’ (Diessel 2004:159), as in You push it and it goes up. For this study, both of these conclusions were tested on the acquisition of French, through a case study of Madeleine’s data. III. EMERGENCE OF COMPLEX CONSTRUCTIONS IN MADELEINE’S DATA The present study analyses the data from the first filming session to the age of 4;01, (corresponding to transcripts available to date). This corresponds to a total number of 9,952 utterances produced by the child during the sessions. In order to track the child’s first uses of complex utterances, all the transcripts were first analyzed for utterances containing more than one verb 5 (leaving aside repetitions). All multi-clausal sentences were then checked in context and counted for each month. Figure 1 below shows the percentage of complex utterances over the total number of utterances each month. - Insert Figure 1 here - Early complex utterances appear at 1;11, and, as could be expected, the proportion of complex utterances increases rather spectacularly as the child grows older, up to about 50 percent of her utterances around the age of 3;0 (when her mean length of utterances (MLU) is 5.6)3. From the adult perspective, and from a basic syntactic point of view, the French system of complex clauses is very similar to the English system, albeit with a few differences in tense and mode marking within the clauses. The same subtypes of multi-clause constructions can be found, namely finite/non-finite complement clauses, relative clauses, adverbial and coordinated clauses. These classical features and sub-type patterns of French complex structures were located and counted in order to give an initial overview of the order of emergence, distribution and development of complex utterances in the data. Figure 2 summarizes first appearance of early subtypes. - Insert Figure 2 here - The coding of the French data according to traditional syntactic subtypes shows that the order of emergence of complex structures is, on the whole, consistent with that observed in first language acquisition of English (Bowerman, 1979; Tomasello, 2003; Diessel, 2004), with a few differences in the order of the first appearances of certain conjunctions. In Madeleine’s 3 See the corpus description in the presentation of this issue. 6 data, syntactic complexification starts with early occurrences of infinitive complement clauses at 1;11, closely followed at 2;01 by idiomatic cleft sentences (c’est moi qui / c’est maman qui) and non-finite intention clauses with pour + infinitive verb (pour pousser). At 2;03, relative clauses immediately follow the joint emergence of et (and) inter-clausal coordination and causal and conditional adverbial clauses in the order of appearance, and precede finite complement clauses and temporal adverbial clauses which appear at 2;04. As the child grows older, between 2;05 and 4;01, she uses other forms of coordination (mais (but), ou (or), donc and du coup (so)), and fronted causal adverbial clauses with puisque (since) and comme (as). From a functional, more child centered perspective, it was necessary to analyze the way Madeleine actually used these constructions in context, and what function she gave them in her dynamic interaction with the adults. In order to do that, all complex utterances were observed in the co-text and situation of use. Several parameters were coded for a more fine-grained analysis of the child’s uses of the various constructions: - The ‘co-text’ of the constructions, i.e. types of verbs in the related clauses, regular co-occurrence of linguistic items, subject pronouns, discursive order of the links, semantic value and pragmatic function of the inter-clausal relationship. - The relation to parental input and parental output; the semantic value and pragmatic function of multi-clausal constructions can be checked in the way the adult interprets the child’s productions and reacts (the use of the video together with transcripts is a valuable tool here). 7 Overall results show that, in child as in adult speech, complement constructions cannot be considered as complex constructions in our French corpus, because they never embed several situations, but only follow a pattern where the main clause actually expresses modalization of the complement clause as in sentences like, for example, je veux faire ça (I wanna do this) or je crois qu’il a faim (I think he’s hungry)4. These results seem to imply that the earliest complex constructions (relating two or more situations) to be used by Madeleine are in fact adverbial and coordinated clauses, which appear jointly at the age of 2;02 (before relative clauses) with parce que (because), si (if) and et (and) conjunctions. The order of emergence of conjoined clauses in Madeleine’s data between 0;10 and 4;01 can be seen in Fig. 2 above. Leaving aside juxtaposition processes for this study, the data was coded for coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, yielding the following progression: parce que (because), et (and), si (if)> quand (when) > mais (but), ou (or), donc, du coup (so), > jusqu’à ce que (until) >puisque (since) > comme (as) > après (after) The distribution of conjunctions across the data is shown in Fig. 3, which highlights the importance of coordinators et and mais in Madeleine’s use, as well as the prominent use of the subordinator parce que in adverbial constructions. - Insert Figure 3 here - The very early use (2;02) of causal adverbial clauses in our French data is consistent with previous studies on the acquisition of causals in 4 The analyses leading to these conclusions cannot be developed here for reasons of space, but will be presented in another study. 8 English (Kyratzis et al 1990; Diessel 2004), in Dutch (Evers-Vermeul and Sanders 2011), and in French (Zufferey 2006), but contradicts experimental studies (Clark 1971; Feagans 1980) which suggest, after Piaget 1948, that backward modification (which goes against the order-of-event principle) should be more difficult for children to understand and produce than constructions which follow the temporal and logical ordering of events (like donc and du coup (so) for example, which, in our data, appear later and in much smaller proportion, see Fig.3). The discrepancy between experimental studies on children’s comprehension and their actual production of these structures is probably due to the fact that children make different uses of these constructions in spontaneous speech. It should also be remarked that parce que (and because in English) do not necessarily construe causal or logical relations between clauses, even in adult speech, and that language cannot be identified with logical relations. In the forthcoming section, we therefore put special emphasis on the analysis of Madeleine’s parce que clauses, and consider the interface between grammatical and semantic complexity. IV. DEVELOPMENT OF CAUSAL ADVERBIAL CLAUSES IN MADELEINE’S DATA: THE CONCERTINA EFFECT The coding of parce que (because) adverbial clauses in the data shows a regular progression of its use from 2;02 (first appearance) to 4;01 (Fig. 4). - Insert Figure 4 here - 9