Clark, Eve Vivienne

2018-05-22T12:45:18Z

2018-05-22T12:45:18Z

1969

There are many different ways of describing a series of events in time; for instance, (a) X happened and, (then) I happened, (b) X happened before Y happened, (c) Before Y happened. X happened, (d) After X happened. Y happened. and (e) Y happened after X happened. Three principles -- order of mention, derivational simplicity and choice of theme -- are proposed to account for how adults choose temporal descriptions in various contexts. The principles are all supported by psychological and linguistic data. These three principles serve as the basis for a developmental hypothesis which predicts the order of appearance of the syntactic constructions used by young children to describe events in temporal succession. It predicts that the main stages that will appear in the children's descriptions during an early period of language acquisition are, first, compound description as in (a) above, then complex descriptions with a subordinate clause in second position, as in (b) and (e), and lastly, complex descriptions with the subordinate clause in first place, as in (c) and (d).

This hypothesis is confirmed by data collected over a six-months period from fifteen three-and-a-half year-old children, some of whom had just begun to use temporal subordinate clauses in their speech. The principal subordinate conjunctions that were used by the majority of the children in this study are when, if and because, A number of other temporal conjunctions also appeared but their use was not so widespread.

Developmentally, the notion of time seems to start with the recognition that events happen at particular times (i.e. at lunchtime) and to progress successively to the relating of these events simultaneous with, preceding and following each other. Evidence that temporal subordinate clauses develop in this order is provided by the types of temporal adverb and conjunction used in the very early stage of language acquisition.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/30493

The University of Edinburgh

Annexe Thesis Digitisation Project 2018 Block 19

Language acquisition: the child's spontaneous descriptions of events in time

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy