This volume brings together new research from different theoretical paradigms addressing the acquisition of French. It focuses on the acquisition of French in combination with English, German, Russian or Spanish and enriches our understanding of the particularities of French and the role of language combinations in the acquisition process. The chapters examine the development of different grammatical aspects (word order phenomena, adjective placement, dislocation and cleft constructions, wh-questions, DP phenomena, argument omissions and constructions with particular word groups) and use various methodologies (such as elicitation tasks, longitudinal studies and parsing experiments) to further add to our understanding of how French is acquired in different contexts. This book will be a resource for researchers and graduate students working in the discipline of language acquisition, especially those who are interested in language contact phenomena where two typologically different languages are involved.
Table of Content
Introduction
1. Anika Schmeißer and Veronika Jansen: Finite Verb Placement in French Language Change and in Bilingual German-French Acquisition
2. Jasmin Geveler and Natascha Müller: Wh-fronting and Wh-in-situ in the Acquisition of French: Really Variants?
3. Laurent Dekydtspotter and Kelly Farmer: On the Processing of Subject Clefts in English-French Interlanguage: Parsing to Learn and the Subject Relativizer Qui
4. Anna Frolova: Verbal Transitivity Development in First Language Acquisition: A Comparative Study of Russian, French and English
5. Anne-Katharina Harr and Maya Hickmann: Static and Dynamic Location in French and German Child Language
6. Jeanine Treffers-Daller and Françoise Tidball: Can L2 Learners Learn New Ways to Conceptualise Events? A New Approach to Restructuring in Motion Event Construal
7. Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes: A Bidirectional Study: Is There Any Role for Transfer in Adjective Placement?
8. Julia Herschensohn and Deborah Arteaga: Parameters, Processing and Feature Re-assembly in L2 French DP
9. Katrin Schmitz: Concluding Remarks
References
About the author
Natascha Müller is Chair of Romance linguistics at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Her research focuses on the syntax of Romance languages and their acquisition. Currently, she is working on the simultaneous acquisition of three first languages.