drs. R.G.A. (Rasmus) Steinkrauss
Faculty of Arts
Applied Linguistics
P.O. box 716
9700 AS Groningen
Phone: +31 (0)50 363 5873
Email: r.g.a.steinkrauss@rug.nl
Period of employment: 1 January 2005 - 1 January 2008
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. C.L.J. de Bot, Dr. M.H. Verspoor.
The investigation of the acquisition of questions has a long tradition
in first language acquisition research. This is due mainly to two
reasons: firstly to the syntactic features of questions, notably
inversion, that are of central interest to generative grammar approaches
to language learning, and secondly to the idea that questions give a
particularly clear picture of children's cognitive development.
My dissertation is inspired by recent findings in cognitive linguistics research on question acquisition in English (e.g., Rowland and Pine 2000, 2003; Dabrowska 2000; Dabrowska and Lieven 2005). The studies show that English-learning children initially seem to operate with lexically specific phrases to form their questions and that these phrases successively develop into abstract grammatical schemas that allow full-fledged linguistic creativity. For example, English children do not seem to use single words when forming their first questions, but longer phrases such as "what is" or "how do you" plus additional linguistic material. Only slowly do they break up these longer phrases and develop abstract knowledge of how to form questions. This is paralleled in other areas of their linguistic development. The explanation for this is mostly sought in the input to children. Child-directed English shows a high percentage of formulaicity, especially in the beginnings of utterances: most utterances begin with one of just a few combinations of words. This is even more true for questions, and so children can initially extract these highly frequent word combinations and rely on them as fixed phrases to form questions. Importantly, these phrases are the beginnings of grammar: over time, children discover similarities and analogies between the phrases they use and develop abstract syntactic and semantic knowledge.
My research aims to investigate whether this phrase-based development also occurs in children who learn German as their mother tongue. German question formation is less formulaic than in English, so the input to children is different and does not promote the use of phrases in the same way. To investigate this, I am not only looking at the overall language development of a German boy, but also into the emergence of some specific questions that he utters. I track the boy's linguistic development up to the production of a specific question and investigate how he builds up linguistic knowledge in interaction with his interlocutors and the world. Because of the unusual density of my database (5 hours/week spontaneous interaction from the boy's second year of life onwards), which includes the boy's as well as his caretakers' speech, I am able to look at language in context and the gradual construction of more and more relevant linguistic knowledge from up close.
Following cognitive linguistics theories, I assume that grammar (syntax) cannot be separated from semantic knowledge and from how language is actually used. Both syntax and meaning are believed to go hand in hand in the acquisition process which is thought to be highly dependent on the personal linguistic experience of a speaker and thus the language (s)he hears and uses. The boy's and his interlocutor's use of language over time therefore are central in my approach.
References
Dabrowska, E. (2000). From formula to schema: The acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Linguistics, 11, 1-2: 83-102.
Dabrowska, E. and E.V.M. Lieven (2005). Towards a lexically specific grammar of children's question constructions. Cognitive Linguistics, 16, 437-474.
Rowland, C.F. and J.M. Pine (2000). Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: 'what children do know?'. Journal of Child Language, 27, 1: 157-181.
Rowland, C.F. and J.M. Pine (2003). The development of inversion in wh-questions: a reply to Van Valin. Journal of Child Language, 30, 1: 197-212.
