Complex sentences: acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode

TLDR

The study examines how 2‑ to 3‑year‑old children acquire connective forms and the meaning relations between clauses in complex sentences. Children first learn the general connective “and,” which encodes all major conjunction meanings, and subsequently acquire more specific connectives tied to distinct syntactic structures, with these learning patterns interacting with the discourse context.

Abstract

ABSTRACT The acquisition of connective forms and the meaning relations between connected clauses in the development of complex sentences is described for four children from two to three years of age. The major results of the study include the developmental interactions between syntactic connectives and meaning relations, and between these interactions and the discourse environments in which they occurred. The first syntactic connective the children learned, and , was the most general: semantically, and was used to encode conjunction with all of the different conjunction meaning relations in the order Additive < Temporal < Causal < Adversative. Other connectives were semantically more specific, and were learned subsequently with different syntactic structures in the order Conjunction < Complementation < Relativization. These results are discussed in terms of FORM, relative linguistic complexity; CONTENT, the intersection of form with conceptual and semantic factors affecting acquisition; and USE, discourse cohesion.