The development of constructions from the right edge: a multinomial regression analysis of clitic left and right dislocation in child French

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 48; no. 5; pp. 1023 - 1047
• Main Authors: JOURDAIN, Morgane, LAHOUSSE, Karen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.09.2021
• Subjects: Child Language; Children & youth; Clitics; Corpus linguistics; Fathers; Form Classes (Languages); French; French language; Hypotheses; Language acquisition; Language Processing; Morphemes; Mothers; Nouns; Regression (Statistics); Regression analysis; Sentence Structure; Sentences; Syntactic analysis; Syntactic structures; Syntax; Verbs; Vocabulary Development; dislocation; syntax; French
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000920000513

The aim of the present research is to investigate the development of left and right dislocation in child French through a corpus study of three children until age 2;7 from the corpus of Lyon (Demuth & Tremblay, 2008). We extracted a total of 704 dislocations and analysed their syntactic properties. We show that (i) right dislocations are more frequent than left dislocations and (ii) left dislocations are significantly more complete than right dislocations (fewer omissions of verbs or pronouns). We compare these results to the hypothesis of Freudenthal, Pine, Jones & Gobet (2015, 2016) according to which some properties of child language can be explained by a learning mechanism from the right edge of the sentences from the input. We will show that this hypothesis can explain the general trend found in our data, but it is not sufficient to account for the entire development of dislocation in French.