09 Philosophisch-historische Fakultät
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/10
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Item Open Access Optional structures in the acquisition of polish : a cross-linguistic perspective(2003) Klepper-Pang, Almut; Roberts, Ian (Prof., PhD)This thesis with the title "Optional structures in the Acquisition of Polish: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective" focuses on the phenomenon of optionality in early child grammar. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the cross-linguistic discussion on Optional Infinitives by providing empirical evidence from Polish, a rich-agreement language. The thesis is based on a longitudinal study of Polish child language data (naturalistic data matching the spontaneous speech criteria) which were collected in Gdansk / Poland over a period of three years. The data base consists of three corpora with a total of more than 11,500 utterances. The data were analysed according to the following research questions: 1. Do the Polish language data show any evidence for an Optional Infinitive Stage, and what does the distribution of finiteness look like? 2. What do the earliest stages of acquisition reveal about the clausal architecture of early child grammar? 3. How does the realization of subjects develop, and what does the distribution of null- vs. overt subjects look like? In addition to this, all three questions were analysed from a cross-linguistic point of view in order to shed light on the theoretical concept of optionality in children's early grammatical systems. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data led to the following results: The Polish child data show no evidence for an Optional Infinitive Stage in Polish. A context analysis of the few occurring main clause infinitives showed that these MCIs mainly occur in modal, volitional or elliptical contexts, i.e. they are contextually licensed. Instead, an investigation of the earliest stages of acquisition has revealed an unexpected finding: the use of imperatives in declarative contexts ("Descriptive Imperatives"). Regarding the distribution of overt- vs. null subjects, the Polish data show a high frequency of overt subjects, which is surprising given the status of Polish as a Null Subject language. The rate of nominal/lexical subjects is strikingly low compared to the abundance of pronominal subjects. These subject pronouns tend to correlate with the use of copular constructions. All phenomena analysed and interpreted from a cross-linguistic perspective seem to speak in favour of the presence of functional categories in the early child grammar, thereby supporting a Continuity View on language development.