Auch and noch in Child and Adult German

"Auch" and "noch" in Child and Adult German is an empirical study of the early acquisition of "auch" (also) and "noch" (also/still) in German, and the adult use of these additive particles in spoken language. It centres around the question of how children acquire these particles, but it also investigates the way in which adults use these particles in order to determine what children actually have to learn and what the input they get is like. Previous studies on focus particles in adult German mainly focused on the semantic and syntactic properties of primarily constructed examples. Based on several corpora of spoken German, this is the first comprehensive study of natural language data that systematically analyses the intonation of focus particle utterances as well as their semantic, syntactic and information structural properties. The study of the child data, an extensive longitudinal corpus of one German child, was carried out against the background of the adult data. It offers a thorough characterisation of the acquisition of the two additive particles that also takes into account results from previous studies on the acquisition of focus particles, mainly on their comprehension. In addition to studying the acquisition of these particles, the author also introduces an analysis of focus particles that emphasises the differences between stressed and unstressed particles, which makes this book not only interesting to researchers in language acquisition and psycholinguistics, but also to those interested in phonology/prosody, semantics, syntax and information structure.

Ulrike Nederstigt is a researcher at the Department of Business Communication at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.