Crosslinguistic paths of pragmatic development The acquisition of actually and en fait by British and French children

Beeching, Kate; Crible, Ludivine

Abstract

Diachronic studies of discourse markers suggest they follow a unidirectional developmental path, from propositional to textual and expressive uses. The present study tests whether children acquire the propositional (literal) before the expressive (pragmatic) functions of two adversative discourse markers in French and English, which have similar core meanings and pragmatic functions. Our results partially confirm the propositional-first hypothesis but semantics and pragmatics appear to work together, rather than first one then the other, at least in this case, and this runs counter to both diachronic theories and usage-based accounts of L1 acquisition. 88 occurrences of en fait and 174 of actually were extracted from the CHILDES database, and coded for two functions (adversative and elaborative) and three domains (propositional, textual, expressive). The results suggest that the pragmatic functions of actually are used by children as young as two years old, but the same is not true of en fait, which is almost exclusively propositional in the early years. By contrast, before age 5, French children start to use en fait for textual and elaborative functions to a greater extent than actually. The role of syntactic position and parental input are discussed.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 21, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Apr 11, 2023
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 11, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 12, 2023
• Journal: Pragmatics and Cognition
• Print ISSN: 0929-0907
• Electronic ISSN: 1569-9943
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 195-221
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.21027.bee
• Keywords: acquisition of discourse markers; English-French contrastive analysis; intersubjectivity; L1 pragmatic development
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10689053
• Publisher URL: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/pc.21027.bee