Präpositionaladverbien im Erst- und Zweitspracherwerb – Pleonasmen oder Funktionsträger?

Abstract

Both German monolingual children and Turkish bilingual children use pleonastic locatives for a certain period of time but they do so for different reasons, as will be shown in this paper. Constructions like Das Buch ist auf dem Tisch drauf, where the spatial relation is signaled twice – in the preposition auf and in the adverb drauf – are grammatically acceptable but are considered somewhat colloquial. It is therefore not surprising that adults in the picture-description task being reported here make no use of the spatial repetition. With the children things are different: Those Turkish L2 learners who start to acquire German at the age of 3 begin by using a semantically unspecified prepositional head for all topological relations (e.g. *Der Apfel ist in/bei Baum/Schale/Tisch instead of Der Apfel ist am Baum/in der Schale/auf dem Tisch). Owing to their mother tongue, it takes them quite long to detect the semantic specification in the input. In particular, stressed and post-final elements attract their attention, and not surprisingly they start using the postpositional spatial adverbs and particles to break through the German prepositional system (e.g. *Das Buch ist in/bei Tisch drauf). Unlike Turkish children, young German native speakers combine these adverbial elements with a full prepositional phrase, but with no functional value. As the data indicate, the pleonastic locative construction appears to be a residue of an earlier developmental stage which involves the splitting of a complex pronominal adverb (e.g. da(d)rauf) and stranding the prepositional part (e.g. Da ist ein Buch drauf). The high frequency of sentence final verb particles in the input (often with identical form and transparent spatial meaning) might produce the preserving effect even though meanwhile the full prepositional phrase is used to express a spatial relation. Already at preschool age German children come to recognize the redundancy and finally drop the adverbial element. Turkish children, however, have to rely on the prepositional adverb – as a supportive and stabilizing „function-carrier“ – until they notice that in German it is the preposition that must carry the specific spatial information. This is subsequently transmitted from the postpositional spatial element to the head of the full prepositional phrase.