The acquisition of German relative clauses: a case study.
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.
Brandt
Silke
S
Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. brandt@eva.mpg.de
Diessel
Holger
H
Tomasello
Michael
M
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning