Volume 12, Issue 1

As children acquire the core rules of their language, they also develop the ability to use it in a sociolinguistically adapted way. Although some works have addressed the production of sociolinguistic variables, few have explored the development of a sociolinguistic evaluative competence in children and their ability to pair linguistic forms and social meanings. With an aged-adapted matched-guise paradigm, we investigate how monolingual children aged between 3 and 11 years old ( N  = 136) acquire French WH- interrogatives. The acquisition of the variants available in adult French has often been linked to their syntactic complexity, but the quantitative data we present offer new insights. By comparing the adult and child networks of social representations associated with interrogative variants, we show that some linguistic forms carry social meaning very early on. This is evidence for a more complex picture of the factors weighing on how children may acquire competing syntactic variants.

This Delphi study investigates whether linguists from diverse theoretical backgrounds can reach consensus on core metaconcepts at the syntax–semantics interface, and how these metaconcepts are perceived as interconnected within linguistic theory and education. Expanding on a previous study conducted primarily with Dutch experts, this research draws on an international sample of 58 linguists across generative, cognitive and functional traditions. Through iterative Delphi rounds and Perceived Causal Network analysis, participants evaluated and refined a shared set of metaconcepts and their perceived relationships. The study identifies a stable core of foundational metaconcepts valued across theoretical traditions and shows that the perceived importance of 23 metaconcepts is largely reproduced from the earlier study, despite the broader linguistic and theoretical diversity of the current expert group. Structural metaconcepts continue to be rated as the most important ones for both theoretical linguistics and language education. The network analyses further illuminate how experts view interdependencies among key metaconcepts, revealing several that function as threshold concepts and may need to be acquired before others can be fully understood. These findings strengthen the validity of a metaconceptual approach to grammar teaching, in which the school grammar curriculum is enriched with metaconcepts that are relevant in linguistic theory. Ultimately, the study helps bridge divisions between theoretical schools of thought and between linguistics and grammar education, offering a shared and empirically grounded foundation for developing learners’ metalinguistic understanding.