Eintrag

Titel

Particles and Compounds in German: Evidence for the Compounding Parameter

Personen

Emily A. Hanink, William Snyder

Jahr

2014

Typ

Aufsatz

Periodikum

Language Acquisition

ISSN

1048-9223

Seiten

199 - 211

Band

21

Heft

2

Schlagwörter

Komposition
Partikel
Spracherwerb

Abstract

This brief article discusses further evidence for the Compounding Parameter (TCP; Snyder 1995, 2001, 2007, 2011, 2012), which is a proposed point of cross-linguistic variation with considerable support from acquisitional studies of English. This brief article provides new support from children's acquisition of German. Two points of German grammar that should both depend on the positive setting of TCP, namely separable-particle constructions and novel endocentric compounding, are shown to be acquired together by each of 10 German-learning children. These data are drawn from 10 longitudinal corpora of children's spontaneous speech from the German section of CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000). The observed correlation remains strongly significant even when contributions of general development (e.g., language-processing abilities, conceptual development) are removed by means of a partial correlation procedure. Control measures reinforce the idea that these data reflect shared dependence of two surface forms on a single point of grammatical knowledge. The findings from German therefore lend strong new support to the Compounding Parameter.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/83450