Academic Paper |
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| Title: | The acquisition of German relative clauses: A case study* |
| Author: | Silke Brandt |
| Institution: | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
| Author: | Holger Diessel |
| Institution: | Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena |
| Author: | Michael Tomasello |
| Institution: | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
| Linguistic Field: | Language Acquisition; Syntax |
| Subject Language: |
German
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| Abstract: | This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-clause word order. In the course of the development, more complex relative constructions emerge, in which the relative clause is embedded in a fully-fledged main clause. We argue that German relative clauses develop in an incremental fashion from simple non-embedded sentences that gradually evolve into complex sentence constructions. |
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This article appears in Journal of Child Language Vol. 35, Issue 2, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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