going-to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development
Abstract
This paper provides a corpus-linguistic, usage-based approach to the acquisition of be-going-to-V and be-gonna-V. Based on longitudinal data from two American children, it is argued that the constructions develop on the basis of several low-level chunks of varying degrees of morphosyntactic complexity. I propose an empirical way of grouping these chunks according to their structural and developmental properties, which allows us to trace how constructional networks emerge, expand and change in early childhood. In addition, this method reveals insights into the way the historically transmitted layering of the constructions is accessed in language acquisition. In particular, I uncover and account for apparent ‘grammaticalization effects’ in child speech, and discuss the relationship between acquisition and change in the cognitive-functional paradigm.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis
- going-to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development
- The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
- The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies
- Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts
- A dynamic view of usage and language acquisition
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis
- going-to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development
- The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
- The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies
- Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts
- A dynamic view of usage and language acquisition
