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Rising grammatical awareness in a French-speaking child from 18 to 36 months: uses and misuses of possession markers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2012

MARIE LEROY-COLLOMBEL*
Affiliation:
University of Paris Descartes
ALIYAH MORGENSTERN*
Affiliation:
Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
*
Adresse pour correspondance: Marie Leroy-Collombel, Université Paris-Descartes, Faculté des Sciences Humaines et Sociales-Sorbonne, 45, rue des Saints-Pères, 75270 Paris cedex 06, France e-mail: marie.leroy@parisdescartes.fr
Aliyah Morgenstern, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, 5 rue de l'Ecole de médecine, 75006 Paris, France e-mail: Aliyah.Morgenstern@univ-paris3.fr

Abstract

Children's awareness of grammar can be traced in the way they use and particularly misuse morphology and constructions in what Clark (2001) calls ‘emergent categories’. We focus our longitudinal study on a French speaking child's use of possession markers (Anaé, Paris Corpus), and her creative nonstandard productions (la poupée de moi for ma poupée/my doll). We provide a detailed analysis of the ways in which she moves between a global strategy thanks to which she locates, identifies and uses whole blocks or constructions without analyzing them, and a more analytic strategy that parallels her progressive mastery of the semantic and syntactic complexity of grammatical morphemes.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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