Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T23:14:41.706Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A developmental cross-linguistic study of adversative connectives: French ‘mais’ and German ‘aber/sondern’*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Michèle Kail  and
Jürgen Weissenborn
Michèle Kail
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale associé au C.N.R.S., Paris
Jürgen Weissenborn
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study concerns the acquisition of the meaning of adversative connectives in French and German children from 7; 8 to 9; 11. French mais has both a substitutive and a contrastive use which is expressed by two different connectives in German, i.e. sondern and aber. 36 French and 36 German children were tested in a completion and a judgement task. Two hypotheses are confirmed: (a) substitutive but is easier to process and hence is acquired earlier than contrastive but; (b) the interpretation of contrastive but-sentences depends on their inferential complexity relative to a given context. A third assumption about the facilitative effect of lexical differentiation in German was only partially supported by the data. This issue needs further investigation with more languages and younger children.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , February 1984 , pp. 143 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anscombre, J. C. & Ducrot, O. (1977). Deux mais en français? Lingua 43. 24–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asbach-Schnitker, B. (1978). Die adversativen Konnektoren aber, sondern und but nach negierten Satzen. In Weydt, H. (ed), Die Partikeln der deutschen Sprache. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L.Lifter, K. & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. JChLang 7. 235–61.Google ScholarPubMed
Bowerman, M. (1981). Cross-cultural perspectives on language development. In Triandis, H. C. & Heron, A. (eds), Handbook of cross-cultural psychology, Vol. 3. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Clancy, P., Jacobsen, T. & Silva, M. (1976). The acquisition of conjunction: across-linguistic study. PRCLD 12. 71–80.Google Scholar
de Villiers, P. & de Villiers, J. (1972). Early judgments of semantic and syntactic acceptability by children. JPsycholingRes 1. 229–310.Google ScholarPubMed
de Villiers, P. & de Villiers, J. (1974). Competence and performance in child language: are children really competent to judge. JChLang 1. 11–22.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, A. R. (1979). A semantic, syntactic and pragmatic analysis of the acquisition of conjunction. Unpublished paper, University of California at Berkeley, Department of Psychology.Google Scholar
Flores d' Arcais, G. B. (1981). The acquisition of connectives in Dutch and Italian. In Deutsch, W. (ed.), The child's construction of language. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
French, L. (1981). But of course preschoolers understand the meaning of but! Paper presented at the 6th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
Givón, T. (1979). On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L., Gleitman, H. & Shipley, E. (1972). The emergence of the child as a grammarian. Cognition 1. 137–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, S. & Miller, J. (1973). Children's awareness of semantic constraints in sentences. ChDev 44. 69–76.Google Scholar
Kail, M. (1980). Etude génétique des présupposés de certains morphèmes grammaticaux. Un exemple: Mais. In Approches de langage. Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne.Google Scholar
Kail, M. & Plas, R. (1979). Psycholinguistique des présuppositions. Eléments pour une critique. Semantikos 3. 1–26.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. (1971). If's, and's and but's about conjunction. In Fillmore, C. & Langendoen, D. (eds), Studies in linguistic semantics. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.Google Scholar
Lang, E. (in press). The semantics of coordination. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leonard, L., Bolders, J. & Curtis, R. (1977). On the nature of children's judgement of linguistic features: semantic relations and grammatical morphemes. JPsycholingRes 6. 233–45.Google Scholar
Miller, M. (1981). Cognition and moral argumentation: five developmental levels. Starnberg: Max-Planck-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften.Google Scholar
Piaget, J. (1924). Le jugement et le raisonnement chez l'enfant. Neuchĉtel: Delachaux & Niestlé.Google Scholar
Pusch, L. (1975). Über den Unterschied zwischen aber und sondern oder die Kunst des Widersprechens. In Batori, I. et al. (eds), Syntaktische und semantische Studien zur Koordination. Tübingen: Narr.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scholl, D. & Ryan, E. (1975). Child judgments of sentences varying in grammatical complexity. JExpChPsychol 20. 274–85.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I.(1983). Universal and particular in the acquisition of language. In Gleitman, L. R. & Wanner, E. (eds), Language acquisition: state of the art. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Tannen, D. (1977). Well what did you expect? Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, 506–15.Google Scholar