Contrast relations in the early aber-clauses of German-speaking infants
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Damaris Bartz
und
Dagmar Bittner
Abstract
The paper focusses on the early production of aber- (‘but’-) clauses in German L1-acquisition. It aims to explain the delay in the realization of finite clause structure in aber-clauses reported in a previous study. Delayed realization of finite clause structure was also reported for clauses containing the additive particle auch (‘also/too’) by other researchers. It has been attributed to the information-structural properties of auch-clauses. Following this approach, we investigated the information-structural properties of the aber-clauses documented in the longitudinal data of five monolingual children (age range: 1;11–2;10) from the first documented aber-production to the emergence of finite clause structure in aber-clauses. Information-structural complexity is measured in terms of number and quality of the information-structural patterns of contrastive information in the aber-clause and the explicitness of the contrast realization. Analyses reveal a change in preference from topic-including contrasts to non-topic-including ones, that is, comment-located contrasts as well as a change from explicit to implicit contrast realization. We argue that the delayed realization of finite clause structure in aber-clauses is caused by an initial concentration on the complex content relations raised by the requirement of information-structural alignment of at least two different constituents as well as the anticipating of an implicit proposition.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (Grant Nr. 01UG1411) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Grant BI 482/4-2). We thank an anonymous reviewer and Christine Dimroth for helpful comments on a previous version of this article.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Contrast relations in the early aber-clauses of German-speaking infants
- Four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch
- Effects of exposure and information structure in native and non-native pronoun resolution in French
- Special Collection in Linguistics Vanguard: “The acquisition of information structure”
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Contrast relations in the early aber-clauses of German-speaking infants
- Four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch
- Effects of exposure and information structure in native and non-native pronoun resolution in French
- Special Collection in Linguistics Vanguard: “The acquisition of information structure”
- The influence of discourse context on children’s ordering of “new” and “old” information
- Information structure in canonical and scrambled dative orders in L2 Korean
- The roles of givenness and type of referring expression in the comprehension of word order in Russian-speaking children
