Focusing Functional Elements: Affirmative Particles and Verum Focus in First Language Acquisition of German

Dimroth, Christine ; Schimke, Sarah und Turco, Giuseppina (2017): Focusing Functional Elements: Affirmative Particles and Verum Focus in First Language Acquisition of German. In: Language Acquisition, Bd. 25, Nr. 3: S. 268-283

Abstract

We examine whether German children attach an adultlike relevance to the pragmatic category of polarity contrast (e.g., In my picture the child IS eating the candies following after In my picture the child is not eating the candies) with linguistic expressions (i.e., the affirmative particles schon/doch/wohl ‘indeed’ and accented auxiliary verbs, known as verum focus) that are frequent in adult speech. A picture-difference task with 4–6-year-olds and an adult control group shows that both groups mark polarity contrast with similar frequency but with strikingly different means: The adults produced verum focus; the children most often used particles. Moreover, the use of polarity-related expressions competes with structures that are never used by adults but are nevertheless adapted to the information structure context at hand. Overall, our findings suggest that from the repertoire of context-adapted solutions, children prefer structures that are conceptually and formally easier and maximally transparent.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Publikationsform: Publisher's Version
• Fakultät: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften > Department 1 > Germanistik > Sprachwissenschaft
• Themengebiete: 400 Sprache > 410 Linguistik
• ISSN: 1532-7817