Réactions adultes aux productions morphologiques des enfants

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On the role of pragmatics in child-directed speech for the

acquisition of verb morphology

Marianne Kilani-Schoch a,*, Ingrida Balciuniene b, Katharina Korecky-Kroll c,Sabine Laaha c, Wolfgang U. Dressler c,d

a School of French as a Foreign Language, University of Lausanne, Faculte des lettres, Anthropole, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerlandb Department of Lithuanian Language, Vytautas Magnus University, K. Donelaicio g. 52, Kaunas 44244, Lithuania

c Austrian Academy of Sciences, Kegelgasse 27, 1030 Vienna, Austriad Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Berggasse 11, 1090 Vienna, Austria

Received 7 March 2007; received in revised form 8 July 2008; accepted 1 October 2008

Abstract

The important role that pragmatics plays in the acquisition of morphology has been hardly studied. In this contribution we focus

on the pragmatic strategies of adult caretakers in their reactions to children’s early morphological productions in three different

languages (French, German, Lithuanian).

The most relevant distinction proposed is that between metadiscursive and conversational reactions, i.e. between reactions on

linguistic form and on content. In contrast to the latter, the former represent interruptions of the flow of interaction. The distribution

of these two types of reactions provides the child with abundant direct and indirect positive and negative evidence about whether his/

her preceding morphological production has been well formed or ill formed. Among these reactions, which may consist in

reformulations, expansions, and others, we emphasize particularly repetitions and their pragmatic functions and show that they are

partially specific to child-directed speech.

A special type of young children’s morphological productions are bare infinitives. In contrast to their grammar-theoretical

accounts in generative studies, we follow a pragmatic approach, based on child-directed speech and caretakers’ reactions, which

evidences the caretakers’ tolerance of ambiguity and thus the importance of inferential work in child-adult interactions. Despite

great grammatical differences between French, German and Lithuanian, the pragmatic strategies used by caretakers are very similar

in quality and quantity.

# 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Child-directed speech; Child Language; Morphology; Pragmatics; Inference; French; German; Lithuanian

1. Introduction

1.1. Aims of the study

In psycholinguistic research such as acquisition or language impairment studies, one makes a great difference

between grammar and pragmatics, and morphology is often seen as the kernel of grammar. But this strict dichotomy

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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 219–239

Abbreviations: CDS, child-directed speech; EMM, Emma; FA, father; fem., feminine; FILL, filler; masc., masculine; MO, mother; MON,

Monika; PL, plural; PP, past participle; SG, singular.

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +41 21 692 30 80; fax: +41 21 692 30 85.

E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Kilani-Schoch).

0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.10.001


cannot be true as already evidenced by morphopragmatic studies on diminutives (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi,

1994; Savickiene and Dressler, 2007) or on French –o suffixed formations (Kilani-Schoch and Dressler, 1999). What

we try to show in this paper is the great importance pragmatics plays in the acquisition of morphology and how it is

linked to important aspects of pragmatic interactions between caretakers (mothers) and small children.

Since the renewal of interest in input or child-directed speech within language acquisition research (cf. Gallaway and

Richards, 1994), many studies have emphasized the importance of repetitions, reformulations, recasts and other caretaker

reactions to children’s productions (e.g. Stephany, 1973; Demetras et al., 1986; Veneziano, 1989, 1999; Farrar, 1990;

Sokolov and Snow, 1994; Clark and Chouinard, 2000; Salazar Orvig, 2000; Saxton, 2000; de Weck, 2000; Chouinard and

Clark, 2003; Saxton et al., 2005; Bernicot et al., 2006b; Clark, 2006; Kilani-Schoch et al., 2006). However, the pragmatic

functions of these adult replies have been little studied (but see Bernicot et al., 2006b) and even less so in relation to

morphologically well-formed and ill-formed 49 children’s utterances. Our study is an attempt to fill this gap.

On the one hand, we propose a way of classifying and analysing adult reactions to erroneous or incomplete

children’s morphology based on pragmatic distinctions. We will investigate whether adults of all three languages react

differentially in terms of continuation vs. disruption of the conversation flow to children’s well-formed vs. ill-formed

morphological constructions.

On the other hand, we raise the question whether the complex situation of the adult who is simultaneously the

conversational partner of the child and the transmitter of language induces her to adopt some special way of

interacting. We handle this question by studying the pragmatic functions of adult reactions (especially repetitions) in

child-directed speech (herafter CDS) and contrasting them with well-known adult reactions in adult-directed speech

(excluding meaning negotiations with non-native speakers learning the language of their interlocutor who has not the

attitude of wanting to transmit his language, as is the case in CDS).

With these two aspects of our study we also want to take up the debate on the learnability of grammar and show that

the learnability of morphology has its main base in pragmatics, i.e. in inferring positive and negative evidence from the

rich data provided in children’s inputs.

Chomsky’s (1980, 1995) claim that young children are confronted with insufficient evidence in their input, i.e. hear

many erroneous sentences, receive incomplete and poor positive evidence and very little negative evidence (cf. Bertolo,

2001; Roberts, 2006) has been widely challenged. The last decades of empirical acquisition studies (Gallaway and

Richards, 1994; MacWhinney, 2004) have provided abundant evidence of a very close input dependency of children’s

outputs on inputs. Exceptions in morphology acquisition can often be well motivated. For example, in languages which

have a distinct second singular present indicative form, such forms are very frequent in children’s input but often emerge

relatively late in children’s outputs. The main reason for this contrast is pragmatic: mothers interacting with their infants

focus on their interlocutors (thus high frequency of the second person), whereas small children rather refer to themselves

(thus high frequency of the first person or the third person agreeing with their own name or baby, etc.).

Moreover, it has been shown that parental input also offers non-negligible direct and indirect positive and negative

evidence in terms of adult reactions to children’s non-adult-like productions (cf. Demetras et al., 1986; Clark and

Chouinard, 2000; Chouinard and Clark, 2003; MacWhinney, 2004; Goldberg, 2006). Saxton (2000) and Saxton et al.

(2005) have demonstrated that such reactions have an effect on children’s grammatical development.

Shortcomings in Chomsky’s view on the problem of inconclusive negative evidence lie also in his insufficient

interest in pragmatics. Given the reference model of an explicit coding of language, such a view ignores the

importance of pragmatic inferences (cf. Grice, 1975; Sperber and Wilson, 1986) which play a crucial role in affording

indirect evidence, as we will insist below.

1.2. Data and coding

The perspective is crosslinguistic, i.e. deals both with morphologically rich Lithuanian and morphologically

relatively poor French and German. Our data come from two French and one Lithuanian and German corpus.1

The French-speaking children Emma and Sophie were born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in an upper-middle class

family. The parents recorded the children at home, 1–2 times a month, in situations of free play and book reading.

The Lithuanian-speaking child Monika, born in an upper-middle class family, was recorded by her mother 2–3 times a

week.

M. Kilani-Schoch et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 219–239220

1 The analysis of French is mainly based on Emma’s corpus.


The German-speaking child Jan comes from an upper-middle class family in Vienna, Austria. Jan was recorded at

home, 2–3 times a month, in interaction with his mother (and occasionally the father or the elder brother) (Table 1).

At the time of recording, the parents did not know that their reactions will be investigated.

The social background of the four children being similar, possible impact of social differences is not a variable.

Such influence deserves further research.

Recording situations of the children vary between free and toy play, everyday situations (e.g. eating, washing) and

picture book sessions. In the three languages transcription and morphological coding of children’s and adults’ data was

done by one of the present authors according to CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). For the purpose of this study, adult

turns with verb, and also a number of turns with noun in German, have been coded according to the metalinguistic or

conversational distinction. This coding was discussed and checked by at least two other members of the group.

Ambiguous turns or cases where coding agreement was not reached were counted separately. As it is shown in

Tables 3a–3d, interrater reliability was high and reached more than 95%.

1.3. Structure

The paper is organised as follows: section 2 introduces the pragmatically based classification of adult reactions to

morphological errors. Section 3 presents main crosslinguistic findings. Section 4 analyzes reactions to periphrastic

morphology focussing on adult repetitions and their pragmatic functions. Finally in section 5 the paper concludes on

the richness of pragmatically induced negative evidence contained in CDS regarding morphology.

2. Pragmatic classification of reactions

Saxton (2000) distinguished negative evidence, consisting in an ‘‘immediate contrast between the child error and the

correct alternative to the error as supplied by the child’s interlocutor’’ (Saxton et al., 2005:223) from negative feedback

typically occurring ‘‘in the form of an error contingent clarification request’’ by the child’s interlocutor. These two

categories however do not seem to have a different corrective effect on the child (Saxton, 2000:237–238). And they cover

only part of the adults’ relevant reactions. For example, positive feedback by ways of adult repetitions is expected by

children as a form of ratification (Krause, 1999). Thus, following Demetras et al. (1986), Veneziano (1999), Clark and

Chouinard (2000), Salazar Orvig (2000), de Weck (2000), Chouinard and Clark (2003) and Bernicot et al. (2006b), we

differentiate repetitions, expansions, reformulations, questions, continuations and back-channels, whereby corrections

may appear in repetitions, expansions, reformulations and questions. Further subgrouping distinguishes repetitions,

expansions and reformulations, which usually have the child’s words as their own constituents, from continuations and

back-channels which usually do not include the child’s words. Questions belong to both subgroups.

These types of reactions are cross-classified by our basic pragmatic division between conversational and

metadiscursive reactions, which goes back to the medieval distinction between speech acts de re ‘on content’ and de

dicto ‘on linguistic form’ (cf. also Perrin et al., 2003).

Our first general hypothesis is that children’s morphological errors trigger metalinguistic adult reactions to a higher

degree than children’s morphologically correct, i.e. adult-like utterances. Morphology, such as syntax and phonology,

M. Kilani-Schoch et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 219–239 221

Table 1

The data.

Analyzed period Turns Length of recordings

French corpus (with verb)

Emma 1;4 to 2;6 1330 60 min/month

Sophie 1;6 to 2;6 2900 60 min/month

German corpus

Jan 1;3 to 2;6 6693 90 min/month

analyzed (with verb)

645

(with noun)

500

Lithuanian corpus 1;8 to 2;8 (with verb) 120 min/month

Monika 3178


is part of the speech act and of the felicity conditions of interactions. Therefore one may expect that in case these

felicity conditions are not satisfied, move-ons, be they topic developments or introductions of new topics, may be

delayed or even impeded and hence the flow of interaction can be broken (cf. Demetras et al., 1986:277). Mainly

metadiscursive reactions represent such interruptions in the interactional flow of conversation, in contrast to mainly

conversational reactions. They signal to the child that there exists a problem in communication and thus constitute

indirect negative evidence.

A second more specific hypothesis of our study is that morphological errors are not expected to be reacted to

uniformly, but differentially. We assume that variation of adult reactions to morphological errors can be mapped onto

the basic distinction between synthetic and periphrastic morphology and that problems with synthetic morphology will

be more often corrected than problems with periphrastic morphology.

Onthebasisofourconcepts,wearriveat thefollowingclassificationofadult reactions tochildren’sutterances (Table2):


Table 2

Classification of adult reactions.

2 One year and 7 months.3 The occurrence of an asterisk before a word indicates a commission error, i.e. a substitution producing an ill-formed form, whereas omission

errors are signalled in the analysis of the examples only.


Each category comprises parallel subcategories, i.e. repetitions, expansions and reformulations. For instance, (1) is

a metadiscursive repetition whose function is to agree with what the child has just said (de dicto), whereas (5) is a

conversational repetition which prepares a refusal. In (8) a reformulation of the child’s erroneous production is

integrated into a question for information.

Repetitions, expansions and reformulations may be either declarative or interrogative.

Clarification questions or requests (metadiscursive or conversational) check or try to make clear what the child

wants to say:



In order to distinguish metadiscursive and conversational reactions one has to rely often on the context. For

example, in (1) the context tells us that the father is not commenting on the child’s action but on her correct

pronunciation of a phonetically difficult word. Explicit (direct) corrections, such as the dismissal of the child’s

production by using the gnomic sentence ‘‘on ne dit pas’’ ‘one does not say’, which may be added to reformulations,

expansions and questions, are always metalinguistic, e.g.

In contrast, implicit corrections (which may be included in reformulations, expansions and questions) are a

metadiscursive element, but may only be a minor ingredient within an overall conversational reaction, e.g. example (7)

above or:

The mother manifests her opposition to the desire or proposal of the child to play the legos (conversational reaction)

by putting into question the action desired. In doing so she repeats and corrects part of the child’s utterance, i.e. the

selection rule of the verb jouer which requires the preposition a fused with the plural definite article les (!aux).

jouer cannot be followed by the article only.5

In this excerpt the mother is attempting to make the child narrate her stay in Paris by asking a referential, hence

conversational, question after an answer which is too short. For this purpose she reformulates and expands on the one-

word utterance of the child consisting of an ambiguous form which could be either the bare infinitive jouer or the

homophonous PP joue.

Here the father casts doubt about the truth of the child’s utterance (conversational reply) after having corrected it in

the first part of his move.


4 A filler is an underspecified place holder, often the precursor of a grammatical morpheme. Most of the time it consists in a (neutral) vowel or in a

syllable (see for instance Peters, 2001; Dressler and Kilani-Schoch, 2001).5 Here the child uses incorrectly the singular article le.


In some cases, the adult turn contains two parts: the first one consists in a metadiscursive reaction, e.g. a corrective

repetition, which is a preliminary to a conversational reaction, e.g.

The repetition of the sentence with a bare infinitive is a stop in the conversation in order for the mother to understand

what is meant by the child. It is followed by a permission that contains a corrective reformulation. The problem is how

to evaluate such turns with regard to the metadiscursive and conversational classification. We have decided that only

the overall value of the turn, i.e. here the conversational value, is relevant for our analysis. Further research should

refine the classification and count such examples apart, taking the initial secondary metalinguistic reaction into

account (see note 9).6

As it appears from the examples considered so far, mainly conversational reactions introduce a new thematic

element in dealing either with the propositional content, e.g.

or the illocutionary force of the utterance, e.g.

where the mother is reacting to the demand of Emma to go out of the bath by a refusal.

Thus reformulations of correct child utterances and echo repetitions, to the extent that they are neither interrogative

nor exclamative, can only be conversational, e.g.

In all these examples, the adult’s reaction is a confirmation of the propositional content or an agreement with the

illocutionary force of the child’s adjacent utterance. (is an example of echo-repetition by the adult of an incomplete

sentence with a lack of auxiliary (before the bare infinitive) and a lack of subject pronoun.

Is the difference between metadiscursive and conversational reactions understandable for children of that young

age? No direct and quantitative evidence is available. However several studies have shown that different types of

clarification questions are understood from 2 years on and that children are able to answer them differentially

(Gallagher, 1981; Anselmi et al., 1986; Pan and Snow, 1999:235–236).7 For instance they do not confuse clarification


6 In Demetras et al. (1986:284–285), such sequences are taken as ‘‘increasing the informational value of the maternal response for that turn of the

conversation’’.7 The question of how children distinguish corrective changes from other changes adults make can be answered by pragmatics of conversation.

There is evidence in children as in adults that on-going speech is monitored at both the levels of conversational goals and forms (Chouinard and

Clark, 2003:665).


questions used by adults to challenge their intended utterance’s meaning with clarification questions aimed at

improving its intelligibility. It seems most probable that the distinction between metadiscursive and conversational

reactions, which is quite parallel to this example, is handled by the same cognitive ability.

In adult language, repetition plays an important role and can be used for a variety of discourse functions (Norrick,

1987; Johnstone, 1987, 1991, 1994; Bazzanella, 1996; Perrin et al., 2003; Bernicot et al., 2006a, see section 4.2.2).

However metadiscursive repetitions and reactions, in general, seem to be more typical for CDS (or for some

interactions between native speaker and non-native speaker, Johnstone, 1987; Norrick, 1987; Ciliberti, 1996:39, 43;

Pica et al., 2006). Their use implying a strong threat for the positive face of the addressee (Brown and Levinson, 1987)

is limited to interactions characterized by a hierarchical relation between speakers.8

Let us add before moving to the next section that our distinction between metadiscursive and conversational

function is mainly analytic: metadiscursive and conversational reactions have the same global pragmatic function of

ratifying the child in her status of a conversational partner (cf. Ninio and Snow, 1996).

3. Results

In this section we are going to provide evidence that caretakers react differently to morphologically incomplete or

erroneous children’s productions on the one hand and to morphologically complete and conventional utterances on the

other hand, i.e. tend to reformulate or repeat erroneous or incomplete morphology more often than to move on, i.e. to

accept or ignore it, as shown by the distribution of metalinguistic vs. conversational reactions.

In all three languages, globally, the metalinguistic reactions to incomplete or erroneous morphological productions

are less numerous than the conversational reactions but are more numerous than the metalinguistic reactions to adult-

like utterances9 (Tables 3a–3d):


Table 3b

Adult reactions to child’s turns with morphological verb errors and to accurate turns: German.

Type of reaction Turns with morphological verb errors Accurate turns

META 106 35% 4 3%

CONV 189 63% 132 97%

Ambiguous 5 2% 0 0

Total 300 100% 136 100%

Table 3a

Adult reactions to child’s turns with morphological verb errors and to accurate turns: French.

Type of reaction Turns with morphological verb errors Accurate turns

META 46 32% 16 5%

CONV 99 67% 319 95%

Ambiguous 2 1% 0 0

Total 147 100% 335 100%

Table 3c

Adult reactions to child’s turns with morphological verb errors and to accurate turns: Lithuanian.

Type of reaction Turns with morphological verb

errors

Accurate turns

META 31 32% 227 8%

CONV 61 64% 2455 92%

Ambiguous 4 4% 0 0

Total 96 100% 2682 100%

8 As suggested by an anonymous reviewer, this point raises the question by what kind of process face might be acquired, which is a worthy subject

for further research.9 A first evaluation of complex turns, i.e. two part-turns with a preliminary corrective repetition (metadiscursive reaction) followed by a

conversational reaction, shows that they do not exceed 10% of all adult reactions.


Within metalinguistic reactions, in French, direct corrections as well as clarification questions on morphology are

limited to very few examples (6 and 3 tokens in Emma’s corpus, none and 1 token in Sophie’s corpus). 90% of

metadiscursive reactions consist in repetitions, expansions and reformulations.

All metalinguistic caretaker reactions provide the child with negative evidence or negative feedback, which has

been shown by Saxton (2000) and Saxton et al. (2005) to have an effect on children’s grammatical development.

Moreover, corrections included in conversational reactions also provide negative evidence. Finally, non-corrective

conversational reactions provide indirect pragmatic evidence for the child that the interlocutor accepts the form of the

child’s utterance. The evidence is either explicit in the case of conversational repetitions and non-corrective

expansions or implicit by referring to the propositional content or illocutionary force without interrupting the

interactional flow of conversation.

As to be expected, metalinguistic caretaker reactions decrease with the decrease of children’s incorrect

morphological productions in time. Whereas at the very beginning (i.e in the first recording session) adults tend to

react metadiscursively to almost every child’s erroneous production, after 2;5 metadiscursive reactions become rare.

This gives further evidence of a relation of dependency between incorrect morphology and metalinguistic reactions,

i.e. that caretakers provide negative evidence.10

4. Reactions to periphrastic morphology

4.1. Bare past participles (French only)

After these general results, let us turn to more detailed findings. Consider first the following example from the

French data:

In this example, the mother does not reject nor correct an incorrect form of the past participle. Interestingly this form is

a potential form of the French verb system, i.e. the default past participle of the class ending in –ir. But more relevant here

is the fact that although a bare past participle is used, it seems to be unnoticed by the mother who is ‘‘normally’’ continuing

the exchange. This example is not isolated. Indeed the number of bare past participles and of bare/root infinitives which

are accepted, i.e. which are followed by a conversational caretaker reaction is striking.

We will start with the bare past participles. French bare past participles have to be analysed as stemming from

compound past structures, i.e. are elliptic periphrastic constructions.

More than two-thirds of the bare PPs in Emma’s corpus (18/28 = 64%), all non-adult-like, are either accepted or

ignored by the adults who simply move on:


Table 3d

Adult reactions to child’s turns with morphological noun errors and to accurate turns: German.

Type of reaction Turns with morphological noun

errors

Accurate turns

META 90 26% 4 3%

CONV 248 73% 145 97%

Ambiguous 2 1% 0 0

Total 340 100% 149 100%

10 It is also an illustration of adult fine-tuning (Snow, 1989), see section 4.2.2.


Adults do not only tend to continue after bare past participles but they themselves use bare past participles in several

non-metadiscursive speech acts. They even use inaccurate bare past participles as in the following examples:

The bare participles found in the input are not all dependent on bare past participles occurring in the child’s

turns and are used independently according to the possibilities of the French adult system. In adult language, some

elliptic past participle forms can appear in, e.g. exclamative sentences, to emphasize the result of an action. For

instance:

4.2. Bare infinitives

Now let us consider bare infinitives.11 Bare infinitives occur in both French corpora.12

In children’s output bare infinitives fulfil different functions. They can be reductions of periphrastic constructions,

e.g. periphrastic future:

Nevertheless, following the most recent approaches to bare infinitives (e.g. Lasser, 2002; Coene et al., 2005), we do

not analyse the majority of bare infinitives occurring in our corpus as elliptic periphrastic structures. Non-modal bare

infinitives can have a descriptive or an imperative value:

Adult reactions to bare infinitives show that they are accepted most of the time, even if they are inaccurate

(Table 4a):


11 Bare infinitives are structurally non-dependent infinitival forms occurring autonomously in an utterance, i.e. without any finite verb form (see,

e.g. Poeppel and Wexler, 1993; Phillips, 1995; Wexler, 1998; Wijnen et al., 2001; Lasser, 2002). Structural dependency is identified by

completeness, i.e. a child’s dependent infinitive is completed by the preceding adult’s finite structure with which it forms a complete utterance.12 They are more numerous in Sophie’s corpus: 17%; Emma: 3% of verb forms.


� only a small number (22%) of bare infinitives are morphologically reformulated, whereas 78% of them are followed

by adult move-ons (responses with non-corrective input; cf. Morgan et al., 1995; Saxton, 2000);

� neither direct metadiscursive corrections nor global metadiscursive questions follow bare infinitives;

� only one single clarification question focused on a bare infinitive can be instantiated:

In German, an analogously small percentage of bare infinitives triggers metadiscursive reactions, see Table 4b.

The same holds for Lithuanian, see Table 4c.

It has been convincingly argued that bare infinitive main clauses have a wide range of uses in languages such as

French and German (Lasser, 2002:778; Laaha, 2004). In the French corpus, examples of adult reactions which expand

on children’s bare infinitives display a high degree of tolerance of non-adult-like occurrences of bare infinitives. This

adult tolerance could not have been possible without the existence of similar models in the adult system.


Table 4a

Adult reactions to child’s bare infinitives: French.

EMMA Bare inf. (tokens) META reactions CONV reactions

93 20 73

% 22% 78%

Table 4c

Adult reactions to child’s bare infinitives: Lithuanian.

MONIKA Bare inf. (tokens) META reactions CONV reactions Ambiguous

56 10 42 4

% 18% 75% 7%

Table 4b

Adult reactions to child’s bare infinitives: German.

JAN Bare inf. (tokens) META reactions CONV reactions Ambiguous reactions

234 86 143 5

% 37% 61% 2%


Lithuanian examples are, e.g.

Examples of co-enunciation (cf. Jeanneret, 1999) with a child’s bare infinitive, as found in the data, constitute

another type of evidence:

In this example the mother builds her second move ‘‘a l’etoile, son histoire preferee’’ on the child’s preceding bare

infinitive ‘‘raconter une histoire’’, i.e. her move depends syntactically on the child’s bare infinitive.

4.2.1. Tolerance of illocutionary ambiguity

The examples of conversational reactions to non-adult-like bare infinitives (and to some of the bare PPs), i.e. of

acceptance of bare infinitives by the caretakers considered so far, give a new insight into the pragmatics of CDS. Given

the illocutionary ambiguity of bare infinitives13 and of some of the bare PPs, these reactions put forward the CDS’

tolerance of pragmatic ambiguity, e.g. in

The bare infinitives may be interpreted either as descriptive (i.e. the child is commenting on her ongoing

action in the latter example or on the action of another agent, in the former example) or as desiderative.14

As illustrated in these examples, the adult tolerance of ambiguity goes so far as to echo-repeat the ambiguous

speech act. Not only do adults often not express explicitly that they have a problem in interpreting the ambiguous

child utterance but they take it even over into their own speech. Indeed almost all of the bare infinitives

occurring in adult speech are ambiguous, even when the adult integrates the bare infinitive into a question of


13 On the pragmatic and semantic meaning of bare infinitives in the development of a francophone child (Sophie), see Kilani-Schoch and Dressler

(2002). A very clear example of the descriptive force of bare infinitives is the following where the child (Emma) reformulates an inflected form by a

bare infinitive: 2;2 MO. ils jouent avec quoi? ‘They are playing with what?’ EMM. jouer. ‘(to) play’ MO. avec quoi ils jouent? regarde ! ‘with what

are they playing? look !’.14 Following the suggestion of an anonymous reviewer, we might ask whether the concept of illocutionary ambiguity in children’s pragmatics

means that a child herself does not know which illocutionary force her speech acts have or whether an adult does not know. Since the child has been

exposed to various contexts and pragmatic meanings of infinitive use, this distributional diversity may have induced her to use this verb form as a, so

to say, useful polyvalent joker. This does not amount to assuming that the child is aware of the illocutionary ambiguity of the infinitive. More

probably, as infinitives have been shown to be semantically more informative and transparent than finite forms (Wijnen et al., 2001 for Dutch, and

this holds at least for German and French as well), she focuses her linguistic encoding on the event denoted and leaves the precise semantic and

pragmatic interpretation to being inferred by the hearer from the context (cf. Lasser, 2002).


clarification: the great majority of clarification questions does not focus on the bare infinitive but on the object of

action.

Exceptions, i.e. non-ambiguous bare infinitives, are, first, constituted by bare infinitives with a directive-prohibitive

force, e.g.

Next they consist in negated bare infinitives whose propositional content excludes a directive interpretation,

e.g.

in which the child describes a state of affairs.

The last type of non-ambiguous bare infinitives in caretakers’ speech are bare infinitives accompanied by an

agreement marker, e.g.

In the last example the mother interprets the child’s utterance as a request and agrees by means of a lexical

affirmation, i.e. she explicitly accepts the non-explicit demand of the child to put together a puzzle with her. It is true

that the situation of interaction with a small child favours a desiderative interpretation of bare infinitives, the

expression of desire being a most basic and important speech act in children’s speech. Nevertheless, as we have seen,

in most cases other interpretations are also possible.

The great tolerance of adults towards illocutionary ambiguity of children’s speech, which implies more

weight on inferential work, appears to be a pragmatic feature typical for CDS, rarely found in adult-directed

speech.

4.2.2. Repetition

Another characteristic feature of CDS which becomes very apparent in the study of bare infinitives is obviously

repetition. In the great number of studies focussing on reformulations or recasts, repetitions in the sense of exact or

verbatim repetitions are less investigated than other types of reactions. Nevertheless, they are typical for CDS

(Johnstone, 1987:211–212; Ciliberti, 1996:39), as evidenced by adult repetitions of utterances with incomplete

morphology such as of bare infinitives or bare past participle repetitions. Syntactic errors which are omission errors

may also be repeated (contrary to the findings of Demetras et al., 1986:286), e.g.

The absence of a subject clitic (probably on ‘one’ in the first example, il ‘he’ in the second example) before va jouer

and s’appelle is not corrected by the caretaker but simply repeated.

Moreover, conventional utterances produced by the children are also repeated by the caretakers in contexts where

adults interacting with adults (ADS) do not repeat, e.g.



In all these examples a simple answer in the form of a back-channel d’accord ‘d’accord’, oui ‘yes’ or at least, in

the last example, with an anaphora in subject position, would be expected in adult interactions. The systematic use

by adults of repetition of the child’s utterances in response to her moves is another manifestation of fine-tuning

(Snow, 1989).

Having stressed the importance of repetition in CDS, we have still to account for the functions they fulfill in

caretaker speech.

Repetition in adult interactions and its functions have been much studied (e.g. Norrick, 1987; Johnstone, 1987,

1991, 1994; Bazzanella, 1996; Perrin et al., 2003).

(A) In adult interactions, the functions of repetitions are numerous16 and strongly context-dependent. Some scholars

divide them into subgroups such as interactional and conversational. Since these categories have blurred

boundaries, we will not take them over.

Repetition17 is characterized by its polyvalence (Bazzanella, 1996:viii): it may express agreement and

disagreement, reciprocity (Kallen, 2005:139), cooperative disposition or its reverse (Merlini Barbaresi, 1996:105)18 as

well as irony, approval and disapproval (Bazzanella, 1996:viii).

Other rather interactional functions are those of giving acknowledgement or taking into account (Perrin et al.,

2003). This function may also be fullfilled with a more conversational flavour: repetition may occur as a kind of

backchannel or be a prelude to a new discourse move. In the latter case it acts as a cohesive linking device (‘‘signal

d’enchaınement’’, van Rees, 1996:142) or takes up a turn after interruption or digression. More generally, repetition of

the interlocutor’s words is a signal of discourse continuity (Bernicot et al., 2006b:30).

With the interrogative form the function of signalling a problem in what has been said, i.e. of indicating that something

is wrong has often been mentioned. It typically corresponds to the confirmation request function (Perrin et al., 2003).

Finally repetition may be deferring, i.e. be a way of holding the floor or of saving time for planification (Norrick,

1987:249; Stati, 1996:168).

(B) All these functions, with the exception of irony, not much used with small children, and uncooperative disposition,

may appear in CDS. We will illustrate them with repetitions of bare PPs and infinitives which are the focus of this

section, whenever possible. We have already seen agreement and disagreement in examples (20) and (43) above.

Approval appears, e.g. in:


15 Notice that examples of repetitions of conventional utterances appear in the utterances of all four caretakers of our corpora.16 For instance Bazzanella (1996:viii) distinguishes several macrofunctions and microfunctions.17 In this paper we will limit ourselves to hetero-repetition.18 According to Johnstone (1994:7) and Merlini Barbaresi (1996:105) verbatim repeats may ‘‘stand for uncooperative disposition’’ and be

‘‘responsible for an impasse in the development of the interaction’’.


Disapproval or refutation:

Indeed when caretakers are getting the child to understand that they are disapproving what she is doing, they avoid

the repetition strategy which may imply endorsement of the child’s perspective, e.g.

Cooperative disposition is a basic ingredient of rearing practices and is a precondition of interaction with small

children. Repetition as solidarity (French connivence), i.e. as interpersonal proximity, nevertheless, is not clearly

mentioned in the literature. It can be instantiated in shared games between child and adult, such as in example (25) above:

Another basic function of repetition in CDS is obviously the function of confirming or ratifying the child as a

conversational partner (Ninio and Snow, 1996). It corresponds to Perrin et al. (2003)’s taking into account or

acknowledgment function. Next comes the checking-up function of repetition, in other words questions of clarification

which signal a problem or express doubt, e.g.

After phonological and morphological errors, reformulation rather than exact repetition is offered to the child, e.g.

It is well known that the ability to produce utterances related to previous interlocutor utterances emerges late in

children and that they are poor conversationalists in the realm of topic maintenance, topic initiation, etc. (Ninio and

Snow, 1996:143–144). Maintaining the semantic topic of the child’s utterance and conversational continuity (Salazar

Orvig, 2000; Hickmann, 2003:102; de Weck, 2000) is thus also one of the main reasons of repetition in CDS.

On the other hand, from the adult side, conversation with young children represents a challenge: adults have to find

common topics that do not exceed small children’s cognitive capacities and have to maintain them so that conversation

can move on. Ninio and Snow (1996:155) recall that imitation is a ‘‘primary device used by children to maintain

coherence across turns’’. In CDS, adults can guarantee topic continuation by asking questions or requesting

reformulations. However with very young children, the high level of attention and effort required from adults as

conversational leaders cannot be constant. Repetitions (mainly assertive but occasionally also interrogative) may thus

be used as a strategy to save the time necessary for finding ways of continuing conversation in relation to the child’s

topics, i.e. repetitions can function as conversational fillers.19 In this way, in addition to ratifying the child’s speech,

repetitions are tools for avoiding interactional breakdown.


19 Cf. Demetras et al. (1986:279) who call some uses of yeah conversation fillers.


We identify the filler function of a repetition in a, so to say, negative way: it is hypothesized when no specific

function is dominant in the context analyzed. For instance, evidence comes from other echo-repetitions of

conventional utterances which otherwise cannot be accounted for, e.g.

In the two examples repetition also achieves some fundamental interactive goals, e.g. it indicates that the adult is

participating to the game (59) and that she is taking what the child is saying into account (60).

Repetitions also often occur in the same turn as a prelude to the adult’s own utterance. They provide the adult with

the time which is necessary for trying to understand what the child is saying and for preparing his reaction, e.g.

However they may also have an attenuative function while occurring before an opposition/refutation move, e.g. as

shown above:

In sum, repetition is a fundamental means of adults for providing children with conversational support.

It constitutes a scaffolding device which integrates children’s utterances into the continuity of the interaction and

allows them to be involved in its construction. In this way repetition contributes to their status of conversational

partners. In addition, repetition (in metadiscursive reactions) is one of the tools at adults’ disposal in their role of

language transmitters. Finally we have seen that repetition also supports adults in their task of leaders in the interaction

with unequal partners (cf. Pica et al., 2006 on talking with non-native speakers).

The next question is what specific functions are assigned to bare infinitives. Very generally, efficacy for the hearer

and efficiency for the speaker (de Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981; Norrick, 1987) is at stake: bare infinitives represent

for the child an economical way of talking, i.e. require less processing capacity in the sense that the speaker does not

have to make a choice as to the appropriate finite form, falls back to the neutral citation form, and leaves the burden of

interpretation to the context and thus to the hearer (Lasser, 2002:788, 791). For the adult, bare infinitives are

economical, i.e. they reduce a multiword phrase to a single word. In addition, they are highly focalized: bare infinitives

emphasize the semantic content of the process, i.e. focus on the nucleus of the proposition. From an interactional point

of view, the use of bare infinitives is obviously the expression of a convergent accommodation (and fine-tuning)

towards the child’s language.

4.2.3. Synthetic vs. periphrastic morphology

We still have to explain why bare infinitives occur at all in adult speech to children. As discussed in section 4.2,

the theoretical approach here adopted for analysing bare past participles and infinitives regards bare infinitives

only partially as elliptic syntactic constructions, i.e. as periphrastic futures without auxiliaries in French and

German and as reduced modal constructions in all three languages, since their uses are more varied (e.g.

descriptive, exclamative or jussive infinitives). Nevertheless, an important part of bare infinitives used by children

correspond to periphrastic structures, or more importantly for our topic, can be attributed by adults to periphrastic

structures.



In addition they are in all three languages citation forms and morphological reference forms (German Kennformen,

see Wurzel, 1984; Carstairs-McCarthy, 1991:224–249; Kilani-Schoch and Dressler, 2005:125, 152) which predict

either alone or in conjunction with another reference form the rest of the paradigm. Finally infinitives are in all three

languages forms used in many different syntactic constructions, including their use also as bare infinitives in adult

language, including children’s input (cf. Lasser, 2002; Laaha, 2004:232–234; Laaha and Bassano, 2005). This can

explain the emergence of bare infinitives in these three as well as in other languages.

The greater acceptance of children’s bare infinitives than of other non-adult-like morphological productions by

adults, as manifested in the greater amount of conversational reactions, can be explained both by the presence of bare

infinitives in adult language and by the following hypothesis: the lack of an inflectional suffix or its substitution in a

synthetic morphological form impairs communication more than the omission of one element of two in a periphrastic

construction. Finally, it has been established (Bassano et al., 2004; Dressler et al., 2003; Bittner et al., 2003) that

synthetic morphology emerges earlier than periphrastic morphology. In adapting, i.e. fine-tuning (Snow, 1989), to their

children’s morphological development, adult caretakers may first put more emphasis on the correct transmittance of

synthetic than of periphrastic morphology.

As to bare past participles, we have seen that they are clear reductions of compound past constructions in French

and German (they do not exist in Lithuanian, cf. Wojcik, 2003) and that they occur in adult French and German as well.

Hence we argue that adults react differently to problems of synthetic morphology and to problems of periphrastic

morphology. Errors of synthetic morphology are most often corrected (directly or indirectly by reformulations),

whereas lacunae of periphrastic morphology are accepted by adults (see Tables 5a–5c). Compare the reactions to

morphologically incomplete or erroneous productions first in synthetic morphology, then in bare PP and bare INF.

An analogous difference between reactions to synthetic and periphrastic morphology can be found with German

noun phrases, i.e. in reactions to errors in noun morphology vs. to bare nouns, which means in German nouns without

articles. This analysis is possible in German, but neither in French (hardly any inflectional morphology on nouns) nor

Lithuanian (which has no articles) (Table 6).


Table 5b

Adult reactions to turns with incomplete and with erroneous verb morphology: distributed results of German.

Type of reaction Analogies and

synthetic errors

Bare PP Bare INF Other errors

META 10 56% 5 13% 86 37% 5 62.5%

CONV 8 44% 35 87% 143 61% 3 37.5%

Ambiguous 0 0 0 0 5 2% 0 0

Total 18 100% 40 100% 234 100% 8 100%

Table 5a

Adult reactions to turns with incomplete and with erroneous verb morphology: distributed results of French.

Type of reaction Tense/number Bare PP Bare INF

META 18 69% 8 29% 20 22%

CONV 8 31% 18 64% 73 78%

Ambiguous 0 0 2 7% 0 0

Total 26 100% 28 100% 93 100%

Table 5c

Adult reactions to turns with incomplete and with erroneous verb morphology: distributed results of Lithuanian.

Type of reaction Tense Mood Bare INF Reflexive form Other errors

META 0 0% 4 44% 10 18% 9 50% 8 80%

CONV 3 100% 5 56% 42 75% 9 50% 2 20%

Ambiguous 0 0 0 0 4 7% 0 0 0 0

Total 3 100% 9 100% 56 100% 18 100% 10 100%


Clearly the Austrian mother tolerates article omission much more than inflectional errors of synthetic morphology.

A few examples may illustrate these errors and the mother’s reactions, first metalinguistic reactions:

Agreement errors are problematic, because one type of them (7 of the 18 tokens) is

always followed by a conversational reaction.

Jan’s frequent predicative and adverbial use of sportlich ‘sportive’ as a very positive qualification is an idiosyncracy

of Jan’s early output, and it is not clear whether this type has to be classified as an equivalent of an attributive use in


Table 6

Adult reactions to turns with incomplete and with erroneous noun morphology: distributed results of German.

Type of reaction Article omissions Agreement errors Inflectional errors

META 63 21% 6 55% (33%) 21 60%

CONV 229 78% 5 (12)a 45% (67%) 14 40%

Ambiguous 2 1% 0 0 0 0

Total 294 100% 11 (18) 100% 35 100%

a In parenthesis seven occurrences of sportlich Auto are also counted (see (68)).


either ein sportliches Auto ‘a sportive car’ or das sportliche Auto ‘the sportive car’, thus as article omission and

agreement error at the same time. Thus Jan’s mother would react to agreement errors either like to inflectional errors

(if one excludes example (68)) or in a manner intermediate between article and inflectional errors.

5. Conclusion

In this paper on adult reactions to children’s morphological verb (and noun) productions based on corpora of three

languages, we have highlighted several characteristics of CDS pragmatics.

Our first finding is that despite typological differences between very strongly inflecting Lithuanian, very weakly

inflecting French and rather weakly inflecting German, there are in all three languages significant differences between

the amount of metadiscursive and conversational caretaker reactions to non-adult-like vs. adult-like verb morphology

(and noun morphology for German) produced by young children. At the same time our pragmatically based distinction

between metadiscursive and conversational reaction has proved to be relevant.

The fact that this study has been based on four children only seems to be an important limitation. It does not allow a

causal interpretation, in the strict sense, of the relation found between caretaker input and child output. However, case

studies have been shown in acquisition studies to be the only way to relate input and output. Two additional reasons

justify this approach: first, coded child language corpora are very difficult to obtain because of the enormous amount of

time (and money) required to accomplish the work.20 Second, to get a quantitatively accurate picture of input and

output speech through sampling often needs much denser data than usually collected (Tomasello and Stahl, 2004),

rendering the time-cost problem even worse. Case studies provide at least the initial description of the phenomenon.

The next finding of our study regards the distinction of synthetic and periphrastic morphology. It appears that in

regard to verb morphology in all three languages, and to noun morphology in German, adults react differently to

children’s problems with synthetic morphology vs. periphrastic morphology (including modal constructions, the only

periphrastic ones in Lithuanian), the former being directly or indirectly corrected relatively more often, whereas the

latter tend to be more often accepted by adults.

This means that children receive less negative evidence and negative feedback for periphrastic morphology than for

synthetic morphology. This difference in reactions most probably contributes to different acquisition paths of synthetic

and periphrastic morphology and to the tendency of synthetic inflection to develop earlier than periphrastic inflection

(Dressler et al., 2003, 2007; Laaha, 2004).

The great tolerance of illocutionary ambiguity in child speech displayed by adults underlines the high amount of

inferential work carried out by adults in interaction with small children, when compared to their adult-directed speech.

Furthermore it shows that pragmatics is very important not only in the production of child-directed speech but also in

the receptive processing of child speech.

Finally we have stressed the importance of repetition in CDS which is applied even to non-adult-like sentences with

incomplete morphology, and we have emphasized the fundamental functions it fulfils: repetition is clearly aimed at

supporting children as conversational partners and at providing them with necessary positive and negative evidence on

language, i.e. at supporting them as language learners.

In sum we have seen:

(a) that the pragmatics of adult reactions to children’s morphology varies according to the kind of morphology and

hence indexes an important grammatical distinction for the child;

(b) that this pragmatic variation basically consists in interruptions vs. non-interruptions of the interaction

(metadiscursive reactions vs. conversational reactions);

(c) and hence that negative evidence for erroneous synthetic morphology is probably pragmatic in nature, i.e. consists

in inferencing work based on interrupting reactions in comparison with non-interrupting ones.

A last question raised by our study is whether reactions of native speakers to second language acquisition

productions could display considerable parallels to our findings. This question might be an important topic for further

research: up to now, available studies contain only some isolated observations, e.g. Jarvis (2003) or cover the types of


20 To have the input and the output entirely coded takes per child approximately 1 year of a full-time job.


corrections to second language learner errors in immersion classrooms (e.g. Lyster and Ranta, 1997) but, to our

knowledge, not the relation between types of errors and native speaker reactions.

Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions. The first author is grateful to the parents of the

French-speaking children Emma and Sophie for their collaboration in collecting the data and checking the transcriptions.

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Réactions adultes aux productions morphologiques des enfants

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